Media representations of migration and racism

Migrants and refugees in Western European media

Based on a research project titled Images of Immigrants in the Media: Thought-Provoking Effects, the thematic focus of Images of Immigrants falls on the ‘news media representations of non-EU migrants’ (d’Haenens et al., 2019: 15). While the authors engage with a range of theories, the main conceptual backing is provided by Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) media systems theory, and agenda setting. The goal of compiling the collection, the editors state, is to ‘formulate recommendations toward a more encouraging integration policy, while lowering anti-immigration and anti-refugee sentiment’ (d’Haenens et al., 2019: 15). The editors introduce the book in Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 offers an analysis of the national migration policies of Belgium and Sweden, which are the primary countries of comparison in the book due to their diverging attitudes towards migration. The perspectives from which migration is explored in the remainder of the book vary: in Chapters 3–6, the authors analyse news media representations of the migration crisis; in Chapters 7–9, the focus falls on public opinion on migration; and Chapter 10 explores the experiences of refugees and migrants.

In Chapter 2, Paul Puschmann, Ebba Sundin, David De Coninck and Leen d’Haenens analyse the migration policies of Belgium and Sweden through the areas outlined in the Migrant Integration Policy Index. They briefly reflect on the political, historical and cultural aspects that may have had an impact on migrants’ reception in each country, concluding that, overall, Sweden is far more immigrant-friendly than Belgium. The authors note Swedish media’s positive attitude towards immigration compared to Belgium’s negative framing of immigration. Potential reasons for those differences are the population and geographical size of the two countries, the cultural differences between them and the failure of the Belgian government to utilise immigrants’ human capital.

Part II is comprised of four chapters. In Chapter 3, Rozane De Cock, Ebba Sundin and Valériane Mistiaen present the results of a content analysis of Swedish and Belgian newspapers between 2015 and 2017 in the context of agenda setting. The results of the analysis indicate that the political responses in both countries focused on domestic points of view, with a particular focus on Syrian refugees, but the most surprising result, the authors note, is that the depictions of refugees in Swedish newspapers were not more individualised than in Belgian newspapers. Chapter 4, by Valériane Mistiaen, includes a lexical analysis comparing the representation of migrants in Belgian French-speaking TV newscasts of public and commercial broadcasters. Although Mistiaen (2019) found that the type of coverage hardly differed between the broadcasters, the study showed that using terms such as ‘conflict’, ‘terrorism’, ‘security’, and ‘health threat’ (p. 73) does not necessarily imply negative coverage. Presenting these terms in a balanced way, contextualising, showing the causes and consequences and offering varied opinions were more important than the terminology itself.

Similarly, in Chapter 5, Lutgard Lams presents the results of a discourse-based transitivity analysis of Dutch-language centre-right newspapers from the summer of 2015 and concludes that political context and journalistic objectivity were essential in constructing migrants in relatively neutral frames despite negative actions appearing twice as much in newspapers as positive ones (Lams, 2019: 96). Although he does not define agency, Lams notes that migrants are largely voiceless and thus not represented as social and political actors. In the final chapter in this section, Stefan Mertens, Leen d’Haenens, Rozane De Cock and Olivier Standaert set out to map the connections between ‘data on policy, public opinion, cultural values, and journalistic cultures’ (p. 101) in three databases: the Migrant Integration Policy Index, the World Values Survey and the World of Journalism Survey. They partially challenge the notion that tolerance and diversity are journalistic values most in line with Western journalism and democratic systems, backed up by findings that interventionism was an important value both in Northern and Eastern European countries, albeit in differing ways. As in the remainder of Part I, contextualisation of values and discourses is of central importance because it helps to problematise the issues of voice, whether it is the voice of journalists, government actors or migrants.

In Part III, the authors shift focus to public opinion about the migration crisis. In Chapter 7, David de Coninck, Hanne Vandenberghe and Koen Matthijs analyse the results of a representative online survey of Belgian and Swedish public opinion to explore attitudes towards migrants and refugees. They found that news media consumption and trust in media had an impact on public opinion, but more important was direct intergroup contact, thus confirming the importance of interaction with people who have experienced migration in encouraging understanding and positive attitudes. Chapter 8 presents the results of a representative online survey about the news menus of the Belgian, French, Swedish and Dutch populations. The most important result of the study is that the news consumption patterns of these countries indicate the potential for the existence of a filter bubble in online news consumption among people who hold negative sentiments towards refugees. The study therefore hints at the potential detrimental effects of online algorithms and the effect of searching patterns, interests, and preferences (Mertens et al., 2019: 143), but does not look in the direction of media literacy, seemingly presuming a high level of digital literacy in the investigated countries. Chapter 9, similarly to other chapters, tests the media’s agenda-setting potential using an online self-reported survey experiment that examined Belgian newsreaders’ responses to dominant media frames about asylum seekers from negative effects on culture and the welfare system to positive effects on the economy. Willem Joris and Rozane De Cock’s (2019: 171–172) main finding was that long-term media representations cannot be effectively countered by limited exposure to opposing or alternative views. They argue that a variety of viewpoints and angles as well as investigative journalism are key to avoiding the dispersion of negative views towards migration.

The final chapter takes migrants’ and refugees’ views as its subject matter, discussing the results of group and individual interviews with refugees and migrants in Belgium through the lens of media ethics, and the notions of agency, recognition, identity and visibility. With this last chapter, the authors tie together some of the thematic elements of the book. The book, as they point out, is an attempt to reduce anti-immigrant sentiments, and this chapter probes scholarly critiques of migrant representations which indicate that they are largely depicted as voiceless, massified and unidentified crowds. In recounting their experiences, migrants stress the importance of being seen by publics as a condition for developing public understanding of migration as a process. They also highlight the importance of showing the ugly realities of migratory journeys, and challenge victimisation discourses and the notion of insurmountable cultural differences in favour of humane subjective depictions. The authors hence propose that increasing the physical and symbolic visibility of migrants and listening to their voices can lead to recognition – a condition that begets solidarity and compassion (Smets et al., 2019: 191–192). While the majority of the book problematises what migration and critical security scholars have identified as dominant representations of migrants as either victims of threats, or as both of those simultaneously within the register of ‘humanitarian securitisation’ (Vaughan-Williams, 2015), this chapter humanises and individualises migrants and allows them to narrate their experiences in their own words. In this way, the book paves the way to what media and gender scholars have argued is an important step towards agency and recognition beyond vulnerability.

The chapters present thought-provoking results, conceptualised primarily through the theories of agenda setting and media framing, and hold the potential to tell us something about ambivalence in the representations of migrants (Chapter 3), witnessing (Chapter 4) and media power (Chapters 5, 7, 9). Although the authors hint at these fascinating themes at the beginning, exploring them in depth is outside of the remit of their inquiry. Instead, the key contribution of the collection is in problematising the connections between negative terminology and negative framing, confirming the importance of contact with migrants and refugees for public opinion and, most importantly, relating all of this to the voices of migrants and refugees themselves. In other words, the book’s contribution is in connecting normative with evidence-based claims that voice matters and that media have an important role to play in facilitating, framing and circulating these varied voices.

Racism in public culture

In the second book, Racism and Media, Gavan Titley (2019) argues that ‘racism in public culture is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere’ (p. 2), and that it is ‘historical and contingent and shifting under changing social relations and through new political conditions and conflicts’ (p. 4). Titley (2019) hence embarks on an examination of racism and postrace through the ‘conjunctural orientation’ of debatability of racism, that is, ‘the constant contest as to what constitutes racism, as to whose “definition” and voice counts, and as to the consequences that should stem from these fractious forms of public recognition and denial’ (p. 3). In Chapter 1, Titley specifies his interest in postracialism, or the evacuation of racism’s enduring sociality which denies the ability to identify the historical, social and structural backgrounds of racism. He takes a discursive approach to media, arguing that it is responsible for constructing, reflecting and circulating mundane depictions of the world to the world, situating his contribution within the study of the public sphere and mediation.

In Chapter 2, Titley draws on critical theory and the politics of representation to demonstrate how race works through discourse as what Hall (2017: 45) has termed a ‘sliding signifier’. He uses what he calls a ‘snapshot’ to exemplify his argument, referring to the enduring existence of Black Pete in the Netherlands as an example of racist visuality. The conditions of postracial debatability within this form of representation – calling out the practice as racist, and the subsequent wounded innocence with which it was defended – demonstrate, he argues, the perennial importance of paying attention to the historical and social legacy of racism and race as a social construct.

The discursive production of the Muslim/migrant in the media is the topic of Chapter 3. In it, Titley argues that the figures of migrants and Muslim populations reach discursive coherence through the ‘affective and ideological sense of “reasonable aversion”’ (Titley, 2019: 98). He claims that the construction of difference obscures the complex social realities that characterise people’s lives and, in so doing, illustrates how the frames attached to the Muslim faith serve to shift debates from individuality to securitisation – systems of bordering focused on securing national borders. Such constructions, Titley argues, elide the diversity of people’s experiences and subjectivities.

In Chapter 4, Titley (2019) uses the idea of a ‘persistent dynamic community’ to explore how social media serves as a hub for developing collective identities in relation to otherwise fragmented and small ‘far-right’ hate groups (p. 116). Debatability in this chapter becomes an ambivalent process and illustrates how bricolage, scavenging and assemblage – terms often associated with activist, grassroots movements – ‘launder digital debris in and across platforms and discursive spaces’ (Titley, 2019: 133) in a hybrid media system, and thereby support the existence of toxic alt-right movements.

Continuing in a similar vein, Titley discusses hate speech in Chapter 5 using as examples the events surrounding the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris. In an attempt to ‘embrace the messiness of contemporary debates about hate speech and free speech’, Titley (2019) notes that hate speech is an ambivalent way of ‘intervening in conditions of debatability’ (p. 141). He suggestes that, in providing content and affordances, social media platforms play a complex role in obscuring the production of hate speech and protecting its existence from platform moderation.

Finally, Chapter 6 provides a theoretical framework for anti-racism in the digital media sphere by reflecting on the affordances of mediated communication for witnessing, agency and counter-publics. Titley argues that digital networks can open new avenues of anti-racist media practices despite their inherent ambivalence, underpinned by what Noble (2018) calls ‘algorithms of oppression’. Ultimately, Titley remains optimistic about mediated communication, highlighting its ability to facilitate opportunities to counter public expressions of racism, facilitate political action and provide a space for sociopolitical mobilisation.

This book presents an ambitious overview of the ‘debatability’ of race in the media through the lens of postrace in Western media landscapes. Titley traces the sociopolitical dimension and historical social relations, which play a significant part in the politics of race and affect how race is inscribed onto individuals and populations. In so doing, he assumes that the Western geographical context is relatively uniform and therefore does not elaborate on the distinctions between the social and media landscapes of the countries from which he draws examples, namely, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States and Ireland. Nonetheless, he presents a cogent analysis of postrace in discourse.

Media practice and media discourse: Framing marginalised groups

Both Racism and Media and Images of Immigrants stress the discursive power of the media to construct and reflect social reality through the mundane representations of everyday life. The authors focus on regularly occurring depictions of historically marginalised groups and the specificities with which different platforms and visualities open and close the opportunities to politicise particular groups and key media events.

The goals of the books differ, however. While Titley is interested in media theory and uses case studies, or ‘snapshots’, to illustrate the effects of postrace on the discursive emergence of racialised populations, d’Haenens, Joris and Heinderyckx’s contribution places emphasis on a normative angle that seeks to demonstrate the complexity of representations and the potential significations surrounding the migration crisis. The data collected for the volume are impressive and the results are a valuable opportunity to not only tell us something about regional and country-specific practices of news-making but also to contribute to the understanding of the interconnectedness of the rise of the extreme right in EU politics, and the affective power of the media.

While the books have differing theoretical backings and methodological foci, it could be argued that they make complementary remarks regarding the mundane, long-term media depictions and the politics of those representations. The essays in Images of Immigrants point to the potentially negative and harmful attitudes that can be difficult to shift and that have been circulating in the media for a long time. In Racism and Media, Titley complicates this supposition, noting – after Alsultany (2013) – that distinct representations are always embedded in wider sociopolitical structures and ideologies, so particular representational strategies such as racialisation ‘often proceed . . . not by rejecting multiculturalism or diversity tout court, but by sifting and ordering acceptable and unacceptable forms of diversity’ (Titley, 2019: 45). In other words, meaning-making is a subtle and shifting intertextual process whose ramifications and underlying political tendencies are difficult to predict and pinpoint, because they create meanings not only about their specific subject matter but also about the assumptions behind them. In this way, Titley argues, meanings of race are created not just through representations of racism but through various other depictions and assumptions in the mediated consumer culture. This is something to consider when reading the results of the studies in Images of Immigrants.

Because of their differing approaches each book will be useful for a different purpose. Images of Immigrants focuses on thematic analysis and presents data in ways that may be useful to media scholars seeking to extend these results by employing discursive methods to analyse the meaning-making process of the migration crisis as seen in the news media of Western European countries. Racism and Media, meanwhile, highlights the discursive aspect of the representations of marginalised populations and theorises the notions of racialisation, domopolitics, postrace and securitisation within the remit of critical theory. In exploring similar themes via differing methods and offering a problematisation of the way in which the normative horizon of representations is constructed in the media, the books are complementary and represent a welcome addition to media literature.