2023-06-23 15:18:05
Since 2001, every June 20 marks World Refugee Day. This year, the dramatic sinking of a ship in the Ionian Sea, off Greecemourns this date again, after having rescued 104 people and having recovered 79 corpses in a boat that is estimated to have had up to 750 people on board.
In March, another shipwreck, this time off Italy, left nearly a hundred dead. In almost all cases, they are people fleeing violence, war and misery..
A recent UNHCR report indicates that the number of forcibly displaced people in the world reached 108 million people in 2022a record number, of which more than 35 million are refugees in other countries.
The figures, motivated in part by the war in Ukraine, even exceed those that occurred during the Mediterranean refugee crisis, between 2015 and 2016. At that time, the migration crisis reached a media presence rarely seen. just remember the image of Aylan Kurdithe Syrian boy drowned on a Turkish beach in September 2015, who has become a symbol of the migration drama.
Migration in southern Europe
As has happened this year with the aforementioned shipwrecks, the focus of this crisis was in southern Europe. To be precise, the largest volume of arrivals was moving from Greece (the eastern Mediterranean, in 2015), to Italy (central Mediterranean, 2016 and 2017) and, finally, to Spain (western Mediterranean, in 2018). In June of that year, in Spain, the arrival of the ship Aquarius It was a turning point.
These countries are the main gateways for migrants to the European Union. One of the claims made from these countries, and which is precisely behind the declaration of a migratory emergency in Italy, is the need for migratory management at a European level, since the burden of managing arrivals falls almost exclusively on the national authorities, when it comes to a challenge at European level.
Added to this is the economic situation of these three countries. At the time of the humanitarian refugee crisis, beginning in 2014, these countries were still recovering from the harsh adjustment measures stemming from the economic and financial crisis that began in 2008. Their challenges are therefore especially complex.
Hate in the media
This migratory reality has coincided –not coincidentally– with the increase in discourses of rejection. These speeches have become popular through social networks and are closely related to the gain of power of openly anti-immigration parties, such as Vox in Spain or the Lega of Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli in Italy.
But the phenomenon of racism and the rejection of immigrants is very complex, and is often related to the media representation of these people in the media. This is something that academic research has been analyzing for some time, having observed that the representation of migration in the media tends to be stereotyped, negative and insufficient.
With these premises, a team from the Audiovisual Content Observatory from the University of Salamanca has led a consortium together with researchers from the University of Milan (Italy) and the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki (Greece), to understand the reality of the media representation of migration in these countries, paying special attention to the hate speech that migrants and refugees receive. This project has recently given rise to a book, entitled Migrants and Refugees in Southern Europe Beyond the News Stories: Photographs, Hate and Journalists’ Perceptions.
The book, edited by professors Carlos Arcila and Andreas Veglis, has combined quantitative and qualitative studies and computational methods to advance knowledge about how the media and social networks in these three countries represent migrants and refugees.
As indicated in its title, this work seeks to go beyond the mere analysis of media content, trying to address issues that have received less academic attention in order to achieve a greater understanding. For this, the focus is placed on three main issues: the photographs used by the main media when covering migratory phenomena, the presence of racist and xenophobic hate speech on Twitter and YouTube, and the opinions of journalists specialized in migration.
Worrying Observations
In the first place, the four predominant visual frames of representation of migrants in the main media of southern Europe were identified: normalization, victimization, social burden and threat.
It has been verified that in the main media of the Mediterranean countries those who represent migrants as victims or as a burden predominate. In addition, negative frames (both those that portray migrants as a burden and those that identify them as a threat) have grown notably between 2014 and 2019. Although the pattern is shared in all three countries, it is the Greek media that do a substantially more negative portrayal of migration through its visual frameworks.
For its part, the presence of hate speech on Twitter and YouTube, measured using computational techniques, seems to be low in absolute terms, and no significant increase has been observed over the last few years.
However, a detailed analysis of the underlying themes in these messages reflects that hatred towards migrants is argued mainly through its association with crime, terrorism and social spending. These narratives are often supported by disinformation campaigns that foster unfounded but strongly held fears.
With this panorama, journalists specialized in the matter are concerned. Although they defend their actions and their professionalism, they also recognize that there are bad practices and limitations, such as precariousness or lack of time, that prevent a more objective, precise and humane coverage of migratory phenomena. A certain division is striking between those who put journalistic practice above all else and those who defend a more activist vocation, defending humanity and the human rights of migrants and refugees as priority values.
To this is added a last element that helps to understand the real effects of these representations: the hate crimes registered in recent years have been increasing steadily in these three countries, but also in most Western countries, as indicated by the data collected by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
How to reverse this situation
To achieve a more humane representation of migration in the media, we propose three strategies:
Greater awareness and awareness of these problems on the part of the different actors, both journalists and media professionals, as well as audiences, including users of social platforms.
More evidence-based journalism, more verification and more depth in the information.
More personal stories, more participation of the protagonists, the displaced themselves, and more narratives that seek identification with these people, avoiding their stigmatization.
This is necessary to tell the full story, so as not to limit migrants to a mass in front of our borders. The migration crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrates that there is another way not only to represent migrants and refugees, but also to respond on an institutional and human level. Hopefully we learn the lesson to achieve better responses to current and future migration challenges.
#criminals #terrorists #social #wasters