Migrants in the media: a quantitative analysis of print media in Spain, Belgium and Germany in the context of the upcoming 2019 European elections.
Description
The matter of migrant related discourses has been a prominent theme in political debates and public discussions leading up to the European elections. The ways in which migration and migrants are framed in the discourse encompases how migration is percieved and constructed in the general consciousness, and has an observable effect on political developments around the world. Media portrayals of migrants influences local communities’ perception and openness to newcomers. Entrance into a community requires participation from both the migrants, and the local communities. This research has been pursued in order to better understand the discursive way in which migrants are being contextualized in the media in three European countries. This study offers a quantitative analysis of nine online newspapers from Germany, Spain and Belgium. Data has been gathered over a two month period to create a lexical database that can be regarded as a whole, or observed as lexical developments over the two months leading up to the elections. To conduct the quantitative analysis, the researchers used TXM, a digital tool that supports the statistical analysis of large volumes of text. Through creating a lexical corpus, the researchers have codified recurring words and “lexical environments” of keywords that the researchers specifically targeted. Analyzing the results against a literary review of previous analysis for each of the three countries provides us with a point of analysis of how migrants are being presented in the discourse. This work is designed to help better understand the ways in which migrants are being depicted to local populations as this framing has been shown to affect voting patterns and the political landscape.
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A review of major online news publications produced in each country was conducted. From the papers reviewed nine online news sites were chosen to be analyzed, three from each of the respective countries. The researchers strove to achieve a fair and balanced representation of different media’s political sensibilities. Media outlets that still had broad print distribution were positively for. Each week, up to 10 articles were chosen from each newspaper. Articles were identified through the use of searching for set keywords used in articles published within established seven day time frames. A maximum of 10 articles per newspapers were selected on a weekly basis. Articles were selected by searching for six distinct terms, translated into the target languages, through each news cite’s search function. The six terms selected were Foreigner, Refugee, Border, Migration, Asylum, and Migrants. Plain text files were created for each paper, each week, which contained standardized forms of the articles found on their respective sites. The text files were then input into TXM, a free lexical analysis program. The researchers compiled weekly corpuses for each country, and then created a general national corpuses containing all articles gathered over the total period of data collection. Lexical outputs from the TXM will then be reviewed to have all definite and indefinite articles removed, as well as prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs. Co-occurrences with the target words were also examined. The exported lexicons were then analyzed against a set of frames established in the literature.