The role of the press in the war on asylum

Abstract

An article based on excerpts from a chapter in the book, Bad News for Refugees by the Glasgow Media Group. It examines, in a detailed content analysis of sixty-nine articles in UK national papers in June 2011, how the rightwing press helped set the political agenda on immigration through a consistent conflation of issues of economic and forced migration, an emphasis on numbers as a threat, the pointing to migrants as an economic burden and potential criminals and a stress on the need for immigration controls.

The 2017 Rohingya Crisis: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Representation in The Daily Star

“…RAS are most often constructed within discourses of securitization, economization, and victimization, embodying mostly negative attitudes [14]- [18]. The victimization frame can be problematic when RAS are depicted as helpless sufferers who are wholly reliant on external aid [19], by implying that they are burdens.…”

“…The conflation of categories related to RASIM is also seen in news [14], [20], [21], and can misinform the public about their situations. Metaphors have been studied extensively to explore how they function in discourse surrounding RAS [22]- [24].…”

Immigration and the British news media: Continuity or change?

“…News coverage often fails to make adequate distinctions between the various types of migration and the categories associated with these types, instead conflating them together in a relatively undifferentiated way (Baker et al, ; Bennett et al, ; Berry et al, ; Blinder & Allen, ; Buchanan et al, ; Gabrielatos & Baker, ; Goodman & Speer, ; Khosravinik, ; Philo et al, , ; Smith, ).…”

“…Perhaps one of the most prominent examples of conflation in recent years has been the use of the terms “bogus” and “genuine” to refer to asylum seekers and refugees, particularly in the press. The use of these terms became more common through the 1990s (Kaye, , ; Smith, ) and continued into the 2000s (Buchanan et al, ; Gabrielatos & Baker, ; Lynn & Lea, ; Matthews & Brown, ; Philo et al, ), although some studies have found that the terms are used relatively infrequently (e.g., Gross et al, ). It is notable that the neologisms and subsequent rise in importance of distinctions between deserving (“genuine”) and undeserving (“bogus”) refugees/asylum seekers came during a period of intense political interest in deterring and criminalising asylum seekers from the early 1990s to the early 2000s in particular.…”

“…Some scholars, particularly those from a critical discourse studies approach, have even formulated a term-"negativisation"-to summarise the process(es) involved in these representational patterns (van Dijk, 1989(van Dijk, , 1991Khosravinik, 2009; see also Bennett, ter Wal, Lipiński, Fabiszak, & Krzyżanowski, 2013). Others have conceptualised them in terms of deviance and moral panic (e.g., Banks, 2012;Berkeley, Khan, & Ambikaipaker, 2006;Hall et al, 1978;Khan, 2012;Khosravinik, 2014), crisis (e.g., Hall et al, 1978;Moore, Gross, & Threadgold, 2012), othering (e.g., Bailey & Harindranath, 2005), threat (e.g., Gross, Moore, & Threadgold, 2007;Innes, 2010;Khosravinik, 2009;Mollard, 2001;Philo, Briant, & Donald, 2013a), and racism/racialisation/xenophobia (e.g., Bailey & Harindranath, 2005;Fox, Moroşanu, & Szilassy, 2012;van Dijk, 1991).…”