Nationalizing the “refugee crisis”: A comparative analysis exploring how elite newspapers in four countries framed forced migration during World Refugee Day

Framing in a National and Global Context

Forced migration and the refugee crisis have been among the most pressing issues of recent years, often stirring intense debate and contributing to political polarization. Media frames can influence how audiences evaluate issues lying at the heart of such public debates (Frear et al., 2019). They tend to increase in importance when news media coverage centers around an ongoing crisis, since specific frames help people understand novel, complex situations (Terracina-Hartman, 2020). As such, understanding news media frames is important when analyzing the contemporary refugee situation.

Scholars differentiate between the psychological and sociological traditions of framing research. The former studies framing effects on audiences while the latter examines what is communicated and how media frames are constructed (Borah, 2011; Gitlin, 2003; Scheufele & Iyengar, 2014). Media frames organize information for journalists and their audiences, provide context for contingent events and suggest a normative evaluation of the issue under investigation (Entman, 2004; Gamson & Modigliani, 1987). Indeed, media frames are influenced by factors internal and external to media organizations, including individual journalistic working procedures, organizational structures, law and technology and media’s relation to economic and political institutions (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014). Frames also resonate with the culture, values and collective identity of a given culture (Carragee & Roefs, 2004; Entman, 2004; Reese, 2007; van Gorp, 2007).

Since strategic actors aim to influence journalistic sense-making (Boyle & Mower, 2018), the process of building a media frame lies on a “continuum between frame setting and frame sending” (Brüggemann, 2014, p. 64). At the same time, news media tend to reflect the perspectives of those who hold dominant positions in society, such as politicians, ambassadors and business leaders (e.g., Corcoran & Fahy, 2009; Matthews, 2020), who aim to “push their views in a way that forges the audience’s perceptions and responsibility assignments of social problems” (Chang & Lee, 2020, p. 94). Accordingly, this study highlights a complicated frame-building process, which manifests itself through the delicate tensions between various agents.

In this study, the focus is on three key agents: the UN as a strategic actor trying to influence the framing of local media to forge a desired audience perceptions on refugee-related issues around WRD; local social elites, who persistently try to shape public perceptions about refugees and migrants (Corcoran & Fahy, 2009; Matthews, 2020); and, last but not least, local newspapers, which serve as the conduits of the narrative and are influenced by external social structures as well as internal professional constraints. To highlight the tensions inherent in framing forced migration, we focus on “global journalism”—a unique form of journalistic storytelling, which blurs traditional boundaries between domestic and foreign news and provides a cosmopolitan viewpoint on global issues (Berglez, 2008; van Leuven & Berglez, 2016). In most cases, global journalism “actively seeks out the connection between the local and the global in the coverage of international events” (Zhang & Hellmueller, 2017, p. 484). Using global journalism as an analytical framework, we assume that instead of framing migration-related issues strictly as a global problem, local media employ various national frames adapted to local audiences, which culturally resonate with publicly shared values, beliefs and ideas (Entman, 2004; van Gorp, 2007). Scholars uncovered differences in the ways in which media follow the ideal of global journalism and adapt international events to fit a national context (van Leuven & Berglez, 2016; Zhang & Hellmueller, 2017). The framing process of forced migration by the media can serve as a good example when analyzing the tensions between global and national perspectives in news-making.

Framing the Refugee Situation

Most people rely on both local and international media as sources of information regarding migration in general and forced migration in particular (Leung et al., 2009; Sreenivasan et al., 2017). At the same time, public discussions regarding forced migration are shaped by the national, political and cultural backgrounds of host societies (Ritter et al., 2017). Research has provided evidence of parallels between various national perspectives on migration. News media tend to portray immigrants as unequal to the native-born population, connecting them to various types of criminal activities, including terrorism, and highlighting the burden their presence places on the economy (e.g., Ehmer & Kothari, 2018; Goedeke Tort et al., 2016; Greussing & Boomgaarden, 2017; Helbing, 2014). At the same time, news media have frequently addressed cultural differences, xenophobia and legal and human-interest aspects when covering migration (Ehmer & Kothari, 2018; Lichtenstein et al., 2017). Accordingly, it seems that overall, national rather than global, cosmopolitical concerns shape media perspectives on migration issues (Stokes et al., 2017).

In recent years, the United States, India, Germany and Israel have become key destinations for forced migrants from other countries. These countries operate under democratic regimes, which are characterized inter alia by their relatively high levels of press freedom (Freedom House, 2018). Since each country differs in size, culture and migration history, they serve as good testing grounds for exploring how the cosmopolitan messaging surrounding WRD is adapted and absorbed in different national contexts. Interestingly, studies reveal that local media in these four countries tend to address refugees and forced migrants in a similar manner.

In the United States, immigration, including forced migration, is both part of the national ethos and part of the legacy of recurring racial and ethnic strife. From its inception, the United States has prided itself on being a place of refuge and opportunity for oppressed peoples. The United States has been a global leader in resettling refugees taking in more than 3 million people over the years (United Nations Refugee Agency, n.d.). U.S. news media coverage of refugees and forcibly displaced people tends to focus on the economic and social problems allegedly caused by the nonnative population on the one hand, and on human-interest stories, such as individual refugees fleeing deadly situations (Ehmer & Kothari, 2018) on the other. U.S. media stories portraying refugees during the WRD were “hyperlocalized” (Hickerson & Dunsmore, 2016). This means that the stories about refugees relied on “ideas well known to most Americans” (Hickerson & Dunsmore, 2016, p. 436).

Media coverage in Germany, the main European destination country for asylum seekers during the 2015–2016 “refugee crisis” and a key player whose actions have had a decisive impact within the European Union (EU), differed from that in the United States. In German media, the migration issue is related to discussion on the evolving German reinvention as a country that welcomes immigration, an effort that is stained with Islamophobic narratives and right-wing violence. Migrants are associated with crime, terrorism and economic risk (Goedeke Tort et al., 2016; Helbing, 2014). The refugee crisis was initially depicted as a humanitarian catastrophe that required immediate action, but as it developed, it came to symbolize threats to security and cultural homogeneity in Germany (Haller, 2017; Lichtenstein et al., 2017).

Given India’s history of ethnic strife and close to 200,000 people marked as refugees or asylum seekers, the Indian electorate often turns to national and global news outlets to gather information on migrants. Indian news media are no different from the U.S. or German news media in that global stories and news events are viewed through the prism of events occurring more locally. Terms used to describe asylum seekers in India are more often negative than positive. As Vanaik (1997) noted, the media adopted the term “infiltrators” as an overarching term to refer to migrants or refugees seeking asylum (pp. 354–355).

In comparison to the other three countries, the refugee situation in Israel seems less intense, with 54,000 individuals deemed “of concern” by the UNHCR. However, the local debate regarding the “refugee problem” is intense and the Israeli media have demonstrated similar tendencies when reporting about the local refugee situation. The Israeli media, while enabling the opportunity of asylum seekers to speak and be heard, actively denied the truthfulness of their stories by undermining their claims to asylum as false claims. They often echoed the government perspective on local asylum seekers (mainly that they are “infiltrators” that entered Israeli illegally for economic rather than political reasons) and highlighted their “otherness” (Tirosh, 2018; Tirosh & Klein-Avraham, 2019).

Indeed, the 2015 “refugee crisis” attracted a high degree of public and media attention worldwide. Local elites, media outlets and international organizations discussed the crisis and shaped the global discourse on refugees and forced migrants (Greussing & Boomgaarden, 2017; Krzyżanowski et al., 2018). However, while the media attention to the crisis was very high, there remains a lack of research regarding the diverse ways in which the global discourse about the “refugee crisis” was framed in various national contexts and whether this discourse influenced the framing of the refugee situation differentially. As such, our study focuses both on the WRD and on the refugee crisis to examine how the WRD’s desired messages which stand in contrast to dominant perspectives regarding forced migrants, are being adapted and worked through by local newspapers in an important destination countries, and how this adaptation process changed during and after the 2015–2016 crisis.

Consequently, our study seeks to address the following research questions. First we ask about the framing of migration-related stories around WRD:

To consider frame difference between national contexts and developments in the framing over time, we propose the following subquestions:

Second, we paid particular attention to if and how the “refugee crisis” has altered news coverage on migration. We thus propose the following research question:

Method

We conducted qualitative content analysis of national newspapers from the United States, India, Germany and Israel. We selected newspapers in these four countries, as they are all considered major destination countries for forced migrants in recent years, albeit under different circumstances and from different countries. Issues regarding migrants occupy public attention in all four countries, but they differ in many respects. Culture, size and population affect both the capacity and willingness of these countries to take in forcibly displaced people and may affect how forced migrants are treated. These countries boast media systems operating in an environment characterized by relatively high press freedoms (Freedom House, 2018), thus they serve as the testing ground for examining how media in various democratic countries frame forced migration and how this framing has evolved over time. We follow several studies that employ comparative frame analysis techniques to explore news media coverage of issues related to refugees and forced migrants (Dimitrova & Connolly-Ahern, 2007). These comparative analyses argue for the need to include local sentiments while exploring global frames, which we do.

Newspaper Selection

We were not able to collect a sample representative of the entire spectrum of media coverage of the four selected countries for our analysis. We thus selected opinion-leading newspapers considered to provide orientation for other news media (Denham, 2014; Yang, 2003). The elite newspapers we choose are main actors in the process of frame building in their respective country: the New York Times (USA), the Times of India, Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) and Haaretz (Israel). The Times of India is an influential English-language publication in India (Krishnatray & Gadekar, 2014). The New York Times and Haaretz have been compared to each other in previous research and both publications are well regarded in their respective countries and internationally (Fahmy & Eakin, 2014), their articles and opinion pieces often cited in other media. Sueddeutsche Zeitung is the largest circulating “quality” daily in Germany. While the German, Indian, Israeli and U.S. media systems differ, Yang (2003, p. 235) argues that “frames are unavoidably employed by journalists in selecting and presenting media texts, which makes it possible to compare the coverage of certain events across nations.” Our approach is similar to other comparative studies in which authors compare content from newspapers that are functionally equivalent in different countries (e.g., Dimitrova & Strömbäck, 2009; Livingstone, 2003).

Findings

The longitudinal analysis resulted in a few major findings. In all four newspapers, only minor attention was given to WRD as either context or frame of reference. Migration-related articles during this time frame appeared in “peaks” in the news cycles. However, coverage differed when it included what we define as “glamorization” and when the newspapers discussed the concept of “fortress Europe.” We also found two established frames that shaped the discussion related to WRD. These frames appeared before the refugee crisis and continued afterward. This demonstrates that the 2015 refugee crisis did not materially affect the news reporting and framing techniques.

Minor Attention to World Refugee Day

While newspapers took advantage of the WRD time frame to discuss migration-related issues, explanations regarding the WRD initiative and even mere mentions of the day’s official name in the headlines, text or page headers were rare. In the Times of India, WRD was mentioned in only 3 out of 23 articles; in Sueddeutsche Zeitung 18 out of 118 articles; in Haaretz WRD in only 12 out of 60 articles examined; and in the New York Times, only 4 out of the 373 articles analyzed. Nonetheless, even without being specifically mentioned, WRD created a temporal opportunity to discuss migration-related issues in all the newspapers we analyzed, irrespective of the immediacy or salience of the events and issues covered locally at the exact time of publication.

Peaks in the News Cycles

Although coverage of migration-related issues around WRD was fairly consistent throughout the studied period, it was not evenly disbursed across the years. All newspapers paid special attention to migration-related issues in “peaks”—specific years in which relatively more articles concerning migration were published around WRD. In the New York Times, for example, the candidacy and election of Donald Trump as U.S. president corresponded with an increased focus on immigration, refugee and migrant issues. Trump had made immigration control a major campaign issue and placed it at the top of his agenda once in office. Three of the top four years for migration-related articles in the search occurred during 2016–2018. The global “refugee crisis” peaked then, but also unauthorized migration amassed at the U.S. southern border amid the administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy and Trump’s insistence on extending the existing wall between the United States and Mexico. Some news items covered the increasing number of forcibly displaced people worldwide and the resulting tensions related to this, but the New York Times’s coverage was dominated by the domestic focus.

The Times of India, in contrast, posted significantly more articles in 2014–2018. Fourteen articles published in the 5-year period of 2014–2018, as compared with 10 articles published between 2001 and 2013. In 2014–2015, the incoming political party Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) and new Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged to increase India’s global presence and contribute to international welfare and development (“Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat [Bharatiya Janata Party]: Election Manifesto 2014,” 2014). A human-interest story published on June 19, 2016, used WRD as the backdrop to discuss the plight of African refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo residing in New Delhi. The article discussed issues of racism and discrimination against refugee groups and briefly touched upon the challenges faced by the UNHCR in its refugee resettlement efforts. A follow-up article appearing in the newspaper the next day (June 20, 2016) briefly mentioned activities in Chennai, India, where a gathering of people (including advocates and UNHCR officers) discussed the need to update the national legal infrastructure for the recognition and treatment of refugees.

In the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung, we found a cluster of 33 relevant articles in 2018, 3 years following the refugee crisis peak. This high number was ostensibly driven by internal struggles in the German government between Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Minister of Interior, Horst Seehofer, in the summer of Rossmann (2018). In the run-up to regional elections in Bavaria and facing the poor showing of the regional Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) party, CSU leader Seehofer vowed to practice national self-determination in border protection and to refuse entry to asylum seekers who had already registered in another EU country. With his master plan for migration policy, Seehofer challenged Merkel, who sought to further cooperation with EU countries in managing the crisis. This struggle, in which Merkel finally managed to maintain the upper hand, increased the public polarization on the issue of migration and led to civil protests against the CSU in Bavaria.

In Haaretz, coverage peaks were perhaps most visible. Migration-related stories were published around WRD in 2007 (13 articles), 2012 (14 articles), 2015 (6 articles) and 2018 (11 articles). Indeed, as in the New York Times, the 2018 peak was driven by the U.S.–Mexico border crisis and the 2015 peak was driven by that time’s global refugee crisis. However, most articles about migration-related issues published within and in between the peaks of 2007 and 2012 were driven by local Israeli migration issues, which focused on the situation of Africans seeking asylum in Israel (cf. Tirosh, 2018). In 2007, African asylum seekers started entering Israel in high numbers through its southern border with Egypt and their presence in Israel attracted attention (Tirosh, 2018). During the study’s WRD time frame in 2007, Haaretz reported encounters between soldiers and asylum seekers by the border (no author, “The UN: 10 Million Refugees in the World,” 2007) and commentary regarding the effects of asylum seekers’ presence in Israel. In an article titled, “They Will Not Evaporate” (Sinai, 2007; “The UN: 10 Million Refugees in the World,” 2007), the author argued, “Israel is torn between humanitarian instinct and demographic demons. Unlike Europe, Israel is not used to open borders.” In 2012, the peak was driven by the intensified debate regarding asylum seekers in Israel; in that year, the Israeli government (now officially describing asylum seekers as “infiltrators”) decided to build a detention camp for asylum seekers in the desert, not far from the Egyptian border.

Celebrities and the “Glamorization” of Refugee-Related Issues

An interesting finding that appears throughout the years is the influence celebrities and opinion-leaders have had on media discussions about forced migrants during WRD. To raise awareness to the plight of refugees worldwide, the UN and other organizations hire celebrities whom, they hope, will attract greater attention to the largely neglected issue of forced migration. The celebrities, by their mere presence—what we call “glamorization”—are expected to marshal international media attention to the migrants’ predicament. Our study found that both Indian and German news frames formed around the WRD were significantly influenced by the celebrity public relations campaigns, while the New York Times and Haaretz were not. The Times of India, for example, carried four articles within the WRD time frame that emphasized the refugee issue using headlines such as “Teary-eyed Jolie asks leaders to work for refugees” (“Teary-Eyed Jolie Asks Leaders to Work For Refugees,” 2009) or “George Clooney, wife, donate USD 100,000 for migrant children” (“George Clooney, Wife Donate USD 100,000 for Migrant Children,” 2018). Similarly, on June 21, 2018 (The Times of India, 2017), the newspaper was quick to report actions taken by Priyanka Chopra (a Bollywood actress) in her newly expanded role as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Goodwill Ambassador on WRD, citing her Instagram post under the handle “#WorldRefugeeDay” (“Priyanka Chopra on World Refugee Day,” 2018b).

In Germany, WRD received some attention by UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow and UN Special Ambassador Angelina Jolie. Celebrities referred to the human-interest frame in calls for action. Farrow said, “I promised this woman from Sudan that I am going to tell everybody about her dead children. ( . . . ) We can do something” (“Die Kinder von Dafur,” 2006). In addition, the stories referred to the celebrities’ private life highlighting that Farrow suffered from polio when she was young and that both Farrow and Jolie were adoptive mothers.

The “Fortress Europe” Frame

Another frame that coinciding with WRD in a few peaks during the years studied was what we designate as the “fortress Europe” frame. As part of this framing process, the European Union, and Europe in general, are the actors blamed for the migrants’ shaky situation. The New York Times often reflected the UN’s criticism of European countries for both their reluctance to accept a greater number of forcibly displaced people and for enacting laws that further restrict the rights of noncitizens (“Refugee Chief is Criticizing Western Europe,” 2001). The newspaper seemingly took an aggressive stance in some of its headlines and stories regarding the immigration policies of European governments. In 2002, the New York Times published a story, “When Asylum Seekers Knock, Europe Is Deaf” (Lyall, 2002). This trend continued after Trump’s election, “The new report was issued at a time when governments in Europe and the United States have become increasingly resistant to accepting more refugees and asylum seekers as xenophobic political trends have helped feed hostility and mistrust” (Gladstone, 2017, para 5).

In Germany, the “fortress Europe” frame was used to criticize the EU for its wall-up policy and inhumanity. A long Sueddeutsche Zeitung article reported on the wall at the Spanish exclave Ceuta in northern Morocco that serves to keep African refugees out of EU territories: “Inside the Schengen community, borders have fallen but they have increased to the outside. The family doesn’t want to be disturbed, at least not through the back door” (Burghardt et al., 2002). One 2002 article’s headline stated, “Fortress Europe must also be a refuge” (Lubbers, 2002). The frame was frequently addressed following maritime accidents. “Over the years hundreds of migrants have been risking their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean or the Atlantic to reach Europe and thousands of people have died on their journey” (“Flüchtlingsschiff gesunken,” 2003). Criticism of Fortress Europe was further expressed in the press during 2016–2018, following the peak of the migration crisis in Germany. Sueddeutsche Zeitung criticized EU Commission proposals to stop “uncontrolled flows of refugees” by sending distressed refugees at sea back to their countries of origin (Brössler, 2018). This frame was not found in either the Times of India or Haaretz.

Impact of the 2015 Refugee Crisis on Media Framing

Across our sample, the 2015 crisis had no apparent impact on the news framing of migration-related stories around the WRD. Similar themes and framing strategies appeared before, during and after 2015.

Discussion and Conclusions

The analysis “offered in this study” was carried out on a sample totaling 573 articles published over a period of 18 years from four countries. While substantial attention is given to migration-related stories around the time frame of WRD each year, direct attention to the day itself is negligible. But newspapers took advantage of WRD as a temporal opportunity to discuss migration-related issues, and particularly forced migration. While the UN tried to influence how refugees and their situation are depicted in the news globally by setting an international day of commemoration, in effect this influence was limited to the timing of the newspaper coverage rather than the framing, general tone or content of the articles published.

Forced migration-related stories published around the WRD time frame were published fairly consistently over the study period, but were not necessarily evenly distributed. There were marked “peaks”—in years in which relatively more attention was given to immigration in general—in the publications. These peaks, we contend, stem from local and global events that coincide with WRD, which justify the publication of stories about migrants and refugees. The timing of the “peaks” in one country does not necessarily coincide with the peaks in another country and there is no unanimity of either content or messaging in the articles published. Local newspapers (even those boasting the global coverage) address the migration issue primarily when migration-related events appear on their country’s public agenda. This resonates with the idea of a global journalism (van Leuven & Berglez, 2016; Zhang & Hellmueller, 2017) that domesticates global events for local audiences, and underscores the importance of (local) media frames in shaping media coverage. This is not cosmopolitical coverage, which is a key aspect of global journalism.

Our findings provide support for elite theory (Corcoran & Fahy, 2009) that might explain the similarities of frames within different national contexts. Our study’s results indicate that elite media, which are national and international in focus, tend to focus on the opinions of local social elites, for example, politicians, rather than the UN politicians and lobbyists create national immigration policies and it is presumably beneficial to acknowledge their views. In addition, these same leaders are often in regular contact with journalists (Corcoran & Fahy, 2009), while migrants and those advocating on their behalf are not. This might also explain the similarities between different newspapers operating in varied national contexts, while the UN has limited influence. Similarly, international news agencies, professional public relations activities and social media contribute to news globalization, but do not seem to have much impact here. Perhaps what is evident is the new “glocal” journalistic practices, a dialectic of local and global forces that should also be considered by policymakers. Since the deployment of “one-size-fits-all” messaging disseminated to international press agencies does not suffice, policymakers can use the temporal opportunity created by WRD to target messaging to diverse national audiences based on the situation of migrants and refugees in each country.

Despite some media hype worldwide, the “refugee crisis” of 2015 did not substantially influence the coverage and public awareness of WRD. In all four newspapers, the same frames were used to describe migration and forced migrants both before and after 2015. Specifically, the persistence of the “wave of migrants” framing contribute to dismissals of migrants’ individuality and subjectivity and are highly criticized in the literature as downgrading the refugees’ human attributes (Malkki, 1996; Tirosh, 2018). While recent studies regarding the “refugee crisis” claim that the crisis may have changed public discourse on forced migration (e.g., Greussing & Boomgaarden, 2017; Krzyżanowski et al., 2018), our findings do not necessarily support this perspective. Both media and migration studies scholars should be more cautious when describing the contemporary “crisis” as an inflection point. While the numbers of refugees and asylum seekers have increased significantly, news frames that were, and are, used to depict them, and consequently the public conversation about them, have not dramatically changed.

Future research on this topic should take the following limitations into consideration. Wider comparison (i.e., selecting more countries) would enrich the analysis with more diverse perspectives. Crucial attention should be given to countries such as Turkey, Jordan and Iran, which host refugees and asylum seekers in very high numbers yet have relatively restricted media systems. The content we analyzed did not contain letters to the editors, arts reviews, advertisements and the like. These additional sources could have provided a wealth of new unexplored data that may be relevant if we wish to better understand framing processes and cultural perceptions. Similarly, we only looked at articles centered on the WRD, a day dedicated to commemoration. Future research could analyze the distribution and framing of the continual coverage of migrant-related issues rather than coverage surrounding the WRD. Finally, quantitative approaches can be expanded to systematically identify, compare and track framing over time, and can clearly provide additional dimensions in future analysis.

Supplemental Material