Mediated representation of Middle Eastern and African migrants in UK and US press in the Wake of Brexit and Trumpism

Abstract

Immigration was a salient feature of Trump and Brexit campaigns in 2016. In view of this, the study assumes that media coverage of Middle Eastern and African (MEA) migrants in international press might deteriorate. Extracting contents from Bloomberg Businessweek, Time and The Economist magazines for the years 2016–2018, the phenomenon was investigated using quantitative content analysis and qualitative textual analysis methods. The findings showed that MEA migrants are positively framed. However, the metaphors and language of constructing the image of these migrant groups belie the positive frames, making references to migrants’ values, cultural backgrounds, faith, and origins in a way that dehumanises and capable of generating hostile attitudes towards them. Of the categories of sources used, politicians’ voices and quotes dominated the coverage with references to the political actors of the 2016 epochal events, while the voices of MEA migrants are underrepresented. What these findings suggest is that not only did the 2016 Brexit and Trump immigration discourses influenced MEA migrants’ portrayals, they also indicated that the media is still manufacturing consent with regards to immigration coverage.

Keywords

Africa Brexit framing immigration mediated representation Middle East migrants Trump

Introduction

The flow of migrants across the Mediterranean to Europe reached a tipping point in 2015, generating what scholars called questionable media coverage that portrayed the issue as a crisis of existential threat (Laine, 2020) to Western societies. Laine (2020) stressed that regular opinion polls and surveys in the European Union (EU) suggest that the two topmost concerns of citizens are immigration and terrorism which are inexorably linked together. In 2016 the world witnessed two epochal events – the US presidential election and Britain referendum to exit the EU (Brexit) – that reignited immigration debates in public sphere. Both events, according to McNeil et al. (2020), have been associated with exacerbation of scapegoating of migrants since the migrant ‘crisis’ of 2015. Although Trump’s 2016 immigration rhetoric targeted mainly Mexican migrants, and the immigration thrust of Brexit campaign focussed on inter-EU migrants, they nonetheless impacted how migrants from Middle East and Africa (MEA) are received in developed nations and framed in Western media. Some of the adverse effects include policies that emphasised tougher restriction measures against MEA migrants to places like Europe (Moyo et al., 2020) and media reporting that projected misleading perceptions about migrants from Africa and Middle East (Laine, 2020).

Immigration discourses do not exist in a vacuum or in isolation of events. Migration narratives are often products of shared interests oscillating around the media, political and public spheres. The centrality of media in shaping immigration debates is such that, as posited by Bellovary et al. (2020), rich world citizens’ attitudes and perceptions of migrants are more of a function of their nationality; and compared to other migrant groups those from Africa and Middle East are perceived negatively. The present study, therefore, seeks to understand how the anti-immigration rhetoric of 2016 may have shaped representation of MEA migrants, given that they contribute the largest pool of forced migration in the world (Laine, 2020), estimated to be over 22 million in 2018 (Mitchell and Afshari, 2021). While Walter Lippmann and Curtis (1922/1991) argued that media influences the picture of the world in our head, other scholars believe that institutions shape what we know about the world through the media (Hall, 1977/2019; Herman and Chomsky, 1988). Extending this thinking to political discourse, the study contributes to showing how neoliberal rhetoric can exacerbate tension and foster fear about migrants using cultural institutions of mass media to whip up sentiment of what Stuart Hall (1977/2019) termed the ‘ideological effect’. Within the fields of postcolonial and media studies, the study advances knowledge to demonstrate that framing immigration discourse consists of a complex practice informed by rhetoric of political actors, globalisation and media economics to produce (un)intended effects as exemplified by 2016 epochal events that targeted different migrant groups but with far reaching implication on experiences of MEA migrants.

Mediated representation of MEA migrants is explored using three reputable magazines: Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist and Time. The first and second sections of the article reviewed literature that engaged with media and migration portrayals, paying attention to arguments advanced in the construction of MEA migrants’ image in the news and the implications of the representations on attitudes towards them. Next, the theoretical context of the study is discussed from framing and social constructionism perspectives to show the discursive tools employed to create the figure of migrants in the minds of media audience. The discussion and conclusion of the study intersect in elaborating on the implication of the findings in terms of academic contributions and portrayals of MEA migrants in the news. Taken together, the study addresses the following research questions: How are MEA migrants framed? How are sources utilised in the framing of MEA immigration stories? What do origins of MEA migrants and their destinations reveal about MEA immigration coverage? and How does language choice shape the construction of the image of MEA migrants in the news?

Representation of migrants in the news: Stereotypical or sympathetic?

A review of immigration narratives in European media and their effects on attitudes revealed similar patterns indicative of migrants’ portrayals in the news differing on the basis of migrants’ nationality. The review further observed that the representations are overwhelmingly crisis focussed and therefore negative, but with pernicious consequence on the cognitive disposition and attitude of the audience towards immigrants (Eberl et al., 2018). Researchers have blamed the conflict-centred representations of immigration on journalists’ inexperience on immigration issues, limited time to engage in well researched reporting, deliberate choice to sensationalise (Triandafyllidou, 2013), existence of a given ‘formula’ on immigration coverage, and the tendency to subscribe to the notion that ‘something negative has a higher news value’ (Gemi et al., 2013: 266; Laine, 2019). On the issue of prevalence of elite sources (Zaman and Das, 2020) and underrepresentation of migrant voices, Gemi et al. (2013) defended journalists position on the grounds of time and energy to engage in that task. While this argument seems tenable, it is faulty given that if the media has the time and energy to privilege voices of elites and other frame definers in migration discourse, journalists should be able to extend similar professional gesture to migrants in the news. Put differently, Bosch et al. (2019) emphasised that journalists have professional obligation constitutive of ‘talking about migrants, talking to migrants, but, above all, letting migrants talk’ (p. 132). Hence, the media should not be conceived as merely a communicative space but should rather be seen as a moral and political sphere (Chouliaraki, 2017).

The body of empirical articles on media representations of migrants and immigration could be understood in two potential ways. In this study, I classify them as the compliant and complicit media coverages and analyse how they prefigure the image of migrants from Third World nations. Complicit media immigration stories are predominantly negative in the framing of migrants. Usually, this type of reporting is the ‘standard’ and common picture of most immigration portrayals in the news. Following a complicit media approach, journalists (un)consciously create an atmosphere that fosters and facilitates hostile attitude towards migrants. Of course, in such immigration reports migrant voices are either non-existent or in the minority compared to other actors featured in the narratives (Beckers and Van Aelst, 2019). Several studies have shown that often nationalist and criminality frames dominate such media coverages to portray migrants as a problem (Risam, 2019) out-groups and ‘dangerous intruders’ (Mitchell and Afshari, 2021), security risk (Farris and Mohamed, 2018; Greussing and Boomgaarden, 2017), aggressors and victims of violence (Croitoru et al., 2018), ‘impending catastrophe’ (Anderson, 2017), terrorists and sexual deviants (Trifonova, 2020) and health risks (Esses et al., 2013). Migrants have also been excoriated as source of unemployment and poverty (Urbina, 2018) that undermines living standards of native citizens. Sadly, female migrants are less salient, framed as appendages to men, and their labour contributions rendered inconsequential (Lind and Meltzer, 2020; Liu, 2020) in complicit migration discourses. Meanwhile, despite heightened concerns about the cultural suitability of migrants to values of receiving countries, experiments in cross-cultural psychology clearly suggest ‘some complex pattern of continuity and change in how people go about their lives in the new society’ (Berry, 1997: 6).

Conversely, compliant media portrayal of migrants deliberately engages reportage from a positive perspective. In this context, journalists see migrants as humans with dignity regardless of their challenges. Compliant media reportage reaffirms professional duties of journalists as functions that should be compliant to and consistent with ethically conscious journalism practice in the framing of immigration topics. Such representations are rarely the case, but notable examples exist in the literature. Figenschou and Thorbjørnsrud’s (2015) three-country study found that about half of the examined immigration news items humanised migrants, (re)presenting the issue from their perspectives. In a study by Nikos Megrelis using Greek media indicated favourable media depictions that commenced in the 1990s and peaked in the late 2015–2016 during the wave of global immigration crisis. The author noted that the ‘fiercely nationalist’ Greek media and journalists are still engaged in profiling migrants from Asia and Africa, but overwhelmingly the migration coverage has considerably improved, ‘stimulating a wave of sympathy, compassion and solidarity’ (Megrelis, 2017: 38) that painted a positively different picture. Applying discourse analysis on two decades (1990–2009) coverage of migrants in Korean media, Sookyung Kim found positive reporting representative of attitudes towards migrants. But when the articles were subjected to critical discursive analysis, the positive narratives gave way to victimisation and objectification of migrants in a manner that misinterpreted the notion of diversity and ‘overlook the question of how to empower migrants’ (Kim, 2012: 657). Researchers observed, however, that even when journalists eschew stereotypical coverage of migrants, the news construction still suggests that immigrants should prove themselves as trustworthy people in need through heroic actions that conform to the standard of Western culture in order to earn the compassion of citizens and receiving nations (Liu, 2019; Triandafyllidou, 2013).

Images of MEA migrants in the mediated sphere

Based on the compliant and complicit perspectives of immigration discourse in the news, how are images of MEA migrants constructed and what are the effects on them and their situation? Although whites are not exempted from biased immigration reporting (Fox et al., 2012) but the overwhelming profiling of MEA migrants raises serious moral and professional questions about media depictions of different social groups within migration debates. Echoing Edward Said, Morrison (2019) asserted that objectification and materialisation of othering in British migrant news concerning Middle Eastern migrants have colonial undertone. For Jussi Laine, Africa contributes the largest pool of forced migration in history, and more so characterisation of MEA migrants in the news in general remains problematic. Such ‘media coverage has given the misleading impression of a linear, uninterrupted large-scale movement of people heading towards Europe, often represented through maps or other graphics with thick arrows from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe’ (Laine, 2020: 98). Recent scholarly explorations indicate that negative coverage of migrants valorises hostile attitudes and perceptions about migrants (Greenwood and Thomson, 2019; Wenzel and Żerkowska-Balas, 2019). Moreover, stressing ethnicity of migrants has the tendency of exacerbating out-group hatred towards migrants (Eberl et al., 2018) who are usually marked as ‘target groups’ (Mohamed and Farris, 2020).

Researching parenting practices of African migrants in Canada, Alaazi and colleagues found that Canadian newspapers legitimised postcolonial beliefs and ideological attitudes that labelled parenting approach of African migrants as inferior, suggesting they should embrace Canadian western-centric parenting values (Alaazi et al., 2020). In an audience-based study seeking to understand the experiences of African immigrants in the US based on stereotyped portrayals in American media, participants revealed that othering of the African continent defined immigration discourses about female migrants from Africa. Consequently, the distorted media coverage exposes the women to ‘cultural marking’ and a host of other hostile attitudes from US citizens (Pindi, 2019). The trend of factoring religion into the coverage of migrants portends greater threat to the image of MEA migrants. Mitchell and Afshari (2021) posited that absence of or low-level religious literacy among journalists plays significant role on how Muslim migrants are depicted in mainstream migration discourse in the Global North. What this remind us is that being both a Muslim (especially of MEA descent) and a migrant may signify double disadvantage. Schlueter et al.’s (2019) cross-country study found that the anti-Muslim prejudice in immigration narratives was associated with larger population size of Muslim migrants, liberal immigration policies and negative framing in the news. While negative framing rattles and rankles, Cheng et al. (2010) stated that on rare occasions negative coverage might have limited effects and therefore less relevant compared to positive news stories. Given the charged rhetoric of the 2016 events (Trumpism and Brexit) constructed on the threat of migrants, there is no empirical evidence of the possible implication of this immigration discourse on portrayal of MEA migrants in magazine coverages. It is within this problematisation that the present study is situated.

Theoretical context: Framing analysis and social constructionism

Migration topic is a complex one (Blinder and Allen, 2016; Bosch et al., 2019) especially when news representations sidestep causes and uncertainties that forced migration placed on victims. While the 2015 refugees’ ‘crisis’ revived the discourse in the public sphere, it is instructive to point out that securitisation frame that stereotypes MEA migrants can be traced back to the 9/11 and 7 /7 incidents in the US and the UK respectively (Bozzoli and Müller, 2011; Morey and Yaqin, 2011), and incidentally these countries made headlines again in 2016 with immigration as a dominant political discourse. Framing theory helps us to make sense of the complexity of mediating immigration and migrants. Robert Entman argued that frames should account for defining problems, diagnosing causes, making moral evaluations and suggesting solutions (Entman, 1993: 52). But what we witness with typical framing of migrants in the news neglects complexity of the issue and ignores the framing processes suggested by Entman, and instead focuses selectively on migrants’ cultural ‘mismatch’ with Western values and the number of people crossing the Mediterranean in order to justify the phenomenon as a crisis (Laine, 2019). In sum, such simplified media framing defines who gets accepted or not into the receiving nations (Laine, 2019), normalises the interplay of power dynamics detrimental to migrants (Quinsaat, 2014) and exposes them to the butt of othering. Chong and Druckman (2007) stressed that frequency of dissemination is not the definer of framing effects, rather the qualities of frames are indelible catalyst of public perceptions. Regula Hänggli argued that journalists have four framing approaches to apply: balancing choice, story choice, interpretation choice and range of view choice. Each of these framing options implies that journalists are heavily involved in news dialogue (Hänggli, 2020) in a way that could inflame, persuade, polarise or even unify citizens on a given issue of significance to the media.

On the other hand, the constructionist approach is interpretive, calling attention to discursive tools that inform how audiences see ‘reality’ constructed for them in the news (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989) other than based on scientific evidence (Fox, 2018). At the heart of social construction is the notion of meaning making explored through deft use of language, metaphors and emotive vocabularies (Marinescu and Marinache, 2018; Schneider and Ingram, 1993). In immigration news, choice of texts is embedded in a complex web of market interest and political influence, but the use of language ‘becomes not only an exceedingly constructive mediator but can also inhibit people from critically evaluating their opinion’ (Laine, 2019, p. 35). Conceptually, how do framing and constructionism perspectives interact in the news representations of migrants? Framing promotes a contextual foundation and explanation of social construction (Reese, 2010) while the latter provides coherent themes through deliberate selection of words, vocabularies and tropes that give weight to depictions of migrants in the news (Quinsaat, 2014). The interactions are reinforcing and could hide the real picture of events. However, between framing and social constructionism, the theoretical lens that leaves indelible impression of migrants in the audience is debatable. For example, Merolla et al.’s (2013) study indicated that media framing of immigration swayed public opinion in the US compared to metaphorical and language definers of immigrants. Nevertheless, both approaches are pivotal in this study to show how events, media economics, political rhetoric and contextual factors potentially interact to shape mediated representations of MEA migrants in UK and US news media.

Research method and analytic framework

The choice of magazines is based on their interpretive and analytic style of news presentation. This type of interpretive journalism makes magazine contents good communication texts to frame immigration discourses. David Weiss noted that magazine’s social construction of issues is particularly significant in shaping audience ‘values, identities and . . . perceptions’ (Weiss, 2020: 165) of issues and events. The Economist enjoys significant global presence and circulation figures (Holmes, 2020) whereas the liberal and left leaning Time magazine sets public discourses agenda (Weiss and Sternadori, 2020) and ‘is historically the most influential and most widely read publication’ in the US (Kachorsky et al., 2020: 2). On the other hand, Bloomberg Businessweek is a leading player in the North American business magazine market with a ‘strong international profile’ (Power et al., 2020: 6) evidenced in its circulation figures of 980, 000 weekly in 2017 (Bloomberg, 2017). Taken together, these magazines are selected because of their impressive circulation figures, critical engagements with wide ranging issues and influence in shaping policies and public opinions on postcolonial and immigration discourses.

The study employed quantitative content analysis and qualitative textual analysis. Quantitative content analysis was used because it is ‘the most appropriate process for observing and measuring message content’ (Swann, 2021: 80) systematically. This research method was suitable in descriptively analysing the variables pertaining to tones, issue contents and sources in the MEA immigration articles. The textual analysis performed on the texts was inductively informed, starting with familiarisation with article contents through close readings, coding and categorisation to detect patterns, and discursive tools in framing and construction of migrants’ images in the stories. The study covered three-year period (1 January 2016–31 December 2018). The choice of time frame was based on two reasons. First, the year 2016 marks the political upheavals associated with Brexit and Trump’s electoral win with issues of immigration at the centre of both events. Second, three-year period provides ample opportunity to examine potential influence of these events on migration coverage of migrants from MEA regions. The articles were extracted from portable document format, PDF, versions of the magazines. The keywords used for article search included ‘Mediterranean’, ‘refugees’, ‘migrants’, ‘asylum’ and ‘immigration’. Relevance sampling was used. This sampling procedure required including only articles relevant to the study (Schweizer, 2019). Consequently, inclusion criterion for the magazine contents entailed that immigration stories must be discussing immigration issues pertinent to migrants of African or Middle Eastern regions, regardless of whether MEA migrants’ experiences occurred in Europe, US or Africa. Based on this criterion, 182 articles were extracted for analysis. Table 1 showed the distribution of articles across the magazines.

Table 1.

Types of stories featured in the sampled magazines.

Magazine	Editorial	News item	Opinion piece	Total
Bloomberg Businessweek	0	17	0	17
The Economist	0	94	9	103
Time	1	53	8	62
	1	164	17	182

Coding of the articles took different forms: tone, issue content, immigrant groups, sources, destination, and language use. Tone was classified into positive, negative and neutral. News items are coded ‘positive’ if they are discussing the economic/cultural contributions of MEA migrants to host countries. Negatively coded articles are those that are either critical of governments, politicians or non-governmental organisations that favour migrants’ presence or news stories that attribute the problems of receiving countries to the presence of MEA migrants. When articles neither engage with any side of the divides, they are coded ‘neutral’. Unlike other researchers that used introduction and conclusion in articles to decide tone (see e.g. Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015), this study adopted the model of reading through each news item from beginning to end. For issue content, the study coded for whether the articles are concerned with humanitarian gesture, securitisation, economisation or the policy thrust of immigration or anti-immigration discourses. It is important to note that on occasions two frames might be the subject of an article. Migrant group is of interest and importance to the study. Hence, it is coded based on the country or region of the MEA migrants discussed in each article. That way, the researcher is able to know which MEA migrants are mostly in the news as contributing to mass exodus to receiving countries. Destination of MEA migrants was pretty straightforward to code based on the country that predominates in the articles. In some articles there exist discussions that are vague like mentioning Europe while others are very specific with countries like Germany, Sweden or US as destinations for MEA migrants. Sources are grouped into two in the coding process: the bottom-up and the top-down. Migrant voices are coded as bottom-up sources while non-migrant sources are coded as top-down. The top-down sources are further categorised into specifics. After a training on the coding modality with two research assistants, 20 articles were initially coded with the author, resulting in .82 inter-coder reliability in Fleiss method.

Findings

The findings are arranged in response to the order of research questions in the study.

Framing direction and outcome

Three dominant frames were used in the immigration news articles: humanitarian, securitisation, and economisation frames (see Table 2). Securitisation frames highlighted issues surrounding palpable fears about MEA migrants as terrorists, criminals, rapists and potential troublemakers in the receiving countries. While discussing this framing pattern, the magazines make intermittent reference to terrorist attacks in the US, France, and other European countries like Britain, as well as mentioning the rape incidents, for example, in Cologne Germany involving ‘mainly migrants of north African or Arab origin’ on the eve of New Year 2016. Reference to past incidents was used to justify negative narratives about MEA migrants. The economisation frame portrayed MEA migrants as threat to job opportunities for natives given that some migrants undertake the perilous journey for purely economic benefits. Examples were given of MEA migrants who are educated with middle class status in their home countries and still embark on the journey of seeking better opportunities in first world countries. Not all economisation frames were antagonistic to MEA migrants. Some economisation frames portrayed migrants positively as wage earners remitting taxes or entrepreneurs contributing to economic prosperity of countries like US, Turkey, Germany and Egypt. The humanitarian frames focused on the plight of MEA migrants, portraying them as people in need of support from receiving nations. To engender compassion towards these migrants, the coverage emphasised that some of the migrants were desperately fleeing war-torn countries into the safety of developed countries.

Table 2.

Story framing.

Magazine	Economisation*	Humanitarian***	Securitisation**	Total
Bloomberg Businessweek	15	0	2	17
The Economist	33	20	51	104
Time	14	25	28	67
	62 (33%)	45 (23.9%)	81 (43.1%)	188**** (100%)

Negative, positive or neutral in tone.

Negative or neutral in tone.

***

All positive in tone.

****

Exceeds number of analysed articles because some news stories have two frames.

In terms of tone (as shown in Table 3), news items with humanitarian frames were positively portrayed. Overall, about half of the analysed articles were positive to MEA migrants, reflecting on the cultural dynamism engendered by their presence in some communities, economic contributions and acknowledging their precarity that required compassion from rich countries. The number of positive stories about MEA migrants could be considered an improvement in immigration coverage that is perennially negative and unsympathetic to (MEA) migrants.

Table 3.

Story tone.

Magazine	Positive	Negative	Neutral	Total
Bloomberg Businessweek	5	12	0	17
The Economist	48	34	21	103
Time	34	21	7	62
	87 (47.8%)	67 (36.8%)	28 (15.4%)	182 (100%)

Sources and balance

Sources are agents of power and significant definers of news frames (Hänggli, 2020). Major (2014) argued that one of the reasons for this is embedded in the norm and notion of objective journalism. Five categories of sources were identified in the study (see Table 4). This number could be more or less depending on the categorisation. For instance, I placed sources like Amnesty International, UNCHR, UN into the category ‘International Agencies’ while research reports from Pew Research Centre, universities and research institutes, and the voices of researchers were placed in the category labelled ‘Academia’. Police and supreme court made it into ‘Government’. Those that defy easy categorisation were placed in the ‘Other’ category. Examples include religious society, lawyers and medical personnel. Doctors and lawyers could be placed in ‘Government’ category, but the challenge is that there was no clear explanation to know whether they were independent or government employees. For politicians as source, copious references were made to Donald Trump, citing his rhetoric and quotes about immigration and migrants. The role of politicians in Brexit referendum and polarisation about immigration issues among German politicians were also constant in the narratives. What these findings showed are the framing power of politicians and international agencies on immigration issues and policies – an influence that could be (un)favourable to the interest of MEA migrants – and the impact of Brexit and Trump’s rhetoric on immigration.

Table 4.

Sources in the articles.

Government	Academia	Intl. Agencies	Politicians	Others	Total
15 (7.6%)	10 (5.1%)	54 (27.4%)	107 (54.3%)	11 (5.6%)	197* (100%)

Exceeds total number of analysed articles because of two or more sources in some articles.

Even though journalists pay significant attention to institutional power and influence associated with potential sources (Major, 2014), the norm of ethical journalism equally emphasised the essence of balancing stories, factoring the voices of parties involved in a given event. In our case, the perspectives of migrants should also feature as sources in immigration discourse. Inability of these magazines to give adequate voice to MEA migrants raised fundamental question about power and media marginalisation of certain groups deemed powerless, pointing to the fact that migrants should rather be seen on the basis of media construction of their image, and not to be heard (see Table 5). Middle Eastern and African migrants’ voices were featured mostly to gauge the feelings of these migrants but not to challenge immigration policies or contribute to the discourse. Example include ‘What did they decide? . . . Will they let us in?’ (Time 2016a, March 21: 27) coming from a troubled Syrian migrant, Diab Heshmat, in Greece in the wake of EU leaders’ meeting of 18 March 2016 in Brussels to decide the fate of migrants to EU countries. One notable exception was about another Syrian migrant, Fira Alshater, in Germany who used his YouTube skits to challenge Western thinking on immigration with these words: ‘What I try to do is challenge people’s perceptions of refugee’ (Time 2016b, June 13: 47).

Table 5.

Articles that featured and did not feature migrant voices.

Magazine	Without migrant voice	Featured migrant voice	Total
Bloomberg Businessweek	13	4	17
The Economist	69	34	103
Time	46	16	62
	128 (70.3%)	54 (29.7%)	182

Origins and destinations of MEA migrants

The analysed articles revealed two directional flows of immigration involving MEA migrants. The patterns include migration to rich democratic nations and migration to developing countries. For developed nations, countries mostly indicated in the articles were Germany, Italy, Britain, Turkey, Sweden, Australia, France, Greece and the United States (US). Germany and US emerged preferred destinations for MEA migrants while Turkey and Greece featured predominantly as transit nations to other countries in Europe. It is quite easy to surmise that Germany’s initial receptive attitude to migrants made it a preferred destination. On the other hand, migration to developing nations included India and Lebanon (both appeared once) and countries in Africa (e.g. Kenya, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Ethiopia and Uganda).

All the articles on African countries as destination were positively framed. However, coverage patterns of positively framed stories in Africa-as-destination and Europe or US as destinations differ markedly. While positive migration stories about the West as destination focused on contributions of MEA migrants to the economy of host population and promotion of cultural diversity, the positively framed stories about Africa as destination were critical of African governments’ hostile treatments and unwelcoming attitudes towards migrants of MEA origins. For instance, an article in The Economist noted that South Asians who were forcefully evicted from ‘Kenya and Uganda in the 1970s and ended up in Britain suggests that Africa would have done well to keep them’ (The Economist, 2016a, December 24: 12). Another news item stated ‘It [South African government] sees foreigners [Africans] as competing with locals for scarce jobs rather than as boosting the economy with their talent and entrepreneurial nous’ (The Economist, 2016b, March 5: 40). In this type of media coverage, one observes ‘responsible’ journalism at work, holding government accountable and criticising bad immigration policy.

Analysis of migrants’ origins revealed that Syrians (closely followed by Afghans) outnumbered other migrants from Middle East. For Africans, people from Nigeria, Somali and Sudan were in the majority of asylum seekers in Europe and the US. It is also important to note that in some articles, origins are designated as sub-Saharan Africa, Middle Eastern, Africans, or North Africans, thereby making it difficult to identify a single country. Context also matters here. The example of Syrians is understandable given the volatile environment created by war that ravaged the country since 2011, necessitating mass exodus of Syrians to safer environments in the West. Arguably, origins of MEA migrants and context of fleeing their nations informed and influenced some of the humanitarian frames in the analysed news items.

Language and metaphor of construction

Howard Nusbaum reminds us that ‘The way language is used has demonstrable impact on individuals and societal attitudes’ (Nusbaum, 2019: 113). To determine language and metaphorical interpretations, I textually analysed sections from different articles that specifically described MEA migrants’ experiences in terms of country of origin, cultural backgrounds, reception and assimilation in the receiving countries, family values and skills. The sentences/phrases were written by journalists while others such as remarks, comments and statements were attributed to sources. Language use in the news articles further revealed media attitudes towards MEA migrants. Despite the fact that majority of the stories (47.8%) were positively framed, the metaphorical narratives in the stories leave much to be desired. The magazine articles engaged the immigration issue with imagery of ‘crisis’ or ‘biggest refugee crisis’ to sanction the positions of EU leaders and politicians like Donald Trump about ‘limit[ing] the inflow of migrants’, ‘tightening asylum rules’ and ‘fortressing Western societies’. The metaphor of ‘fortressing’ Western societies reinforced Trump’s campaign of building physical wall (through taxpayers’ money) and political wall (through discriminatory immigration policies) as well as his rhetoric that blamed criminal activities and terror ‘attacks on lax borders’.

A good number of analysed articles showed that whenever the issue concerns migrants from Middle East the narratives point towards their immigration status (using words like ‘illegal’, or ‘undocumented’ and ‘undifferentiated mass of invaders’) values (‘Patriarchal Middle Eastern values’), and culture (‘dangerous male migrants from alien culture’). In some instances when MEA migrants are referred by faith, tropes like ‘Muslim men preying on European women’ crop up to frame them as rapists who lack ‘civilised’ sexual manners and willingness to ‘assimilate’ Western values, and thus valorise the call for bordering. The narratives embed the Arab Spring in North Africa and conflicts in parts of Middle East region with sweeping remarks like ‘war ravaged region’ to describe MEA migrants. According to an article, ‘But the threat now is the tide of immigrants coming from the Middle East. It is fair to ask: shouldn’t Europeans spend more on their own defense?’ (Klein, 2017: 23). Even though a good number of news stories used language that dehumanised MEA migrants, it is fair to state that some articles were uplifting to the image of this migrant group. For instance, a piece from The Economist (2018) stated that ‘A decade after their arrival, the average income of a refugee family is close to the American average. Mr [Emmanuel] Makender [a Sudanese taxi driver in Michigan] has paid over $100,000 in taxes. Americans can also relax about their odds of being killed by a refugee’ (March 3: 33).

Furthermore, the findings indicated that in terms of skills MEA migrants are mainly represented as teachers, cobblers, bulldozer or lorry drivers, masons and farm hands. When one thinks critically about these skills, it clearly questions the relevance of these migrants to the receiving countries. Overall, the language of media representation of MEA migrants belied the positive frames that dominated the analysed articles.

Discussion and conclusion

What do these findings mean in light of media coverage of immigration, cultural studies, media effects research and political discourse? First, I need to acknowledge the limitation of the study given the number of magazines studied and articles analysed, calling therefore for inclusion of more magazines in subsequent studies. However, the findings provide illuminating insights to address the question raised above. Based on the typology of complicit and compliant media approach to covering immigration developed in the study, it would be tempting to assign the studied magazines the label of compliant media which suggest engaging with migration issues with a human face, upholding ethical journalism practice that eschews stereotyping, and providing balanced representation for competing interests in migration narratives. For instance, if we stop at the variables of tone and frames deployed in reporting MEA migrants, the magazines would be described as fitting the compliant media image. Interestingly, a good number of migration studies evaluate frames, tones, and on occasions sources, leaving out the fundamental aspect of framing that deals with power exercised through choice of words and the cultural identity associated with people framed in the coverage. But if we account for other variables beyond framing (i.e. tones and frames), the investigated magazines will aptly fit the complicit media description. Thus, one of the modest contributions of this study is to show in light of media and cultural studies the influence of words choice in news-making culture, materialisation of ideology, context and culture on who gets represented and in what light. This point needs further exploration and explanation as would be discussed below.

Media and migration scholars have alluded to impact of statistics/numbers in crime news and criminalising migrants (Lugo-Ocando, 2017; Marinescu and Marinache, 2018), but none tried to demonstrate how language choice activates statistics to create the metaphors that define migrants in political discourse and the public sphere. Exception exists though. As Jussi Laine observed, the mass movement of migrants ‘was not really a “crisis” until the number of registered asylum seekers reached a million’, giving vent to the notion that such numbers constitute threat (Laine, 2019: 37) to receiving nations, and thus commenced the proliferation of elemental tropes such as ‘tidal waves’, ‘influx’ or ‘surge’ to cast MEA migrants as invaders. One example is worth citing from the analysed articles to buttress this point. A Bloomberg Businessweek piece stated that ‘The influx of at least 1.4 million refugees from neighbouring Syria has further strained Jordan’s infrastructure’ (Shiryaevskaya et al., 2018: 14) and similar trajectory and representation strategy was applied in another article, using numbers to portray the ‘implication’ of Afghans and Syrians from ‘war-ravaged countries’ on the population of Sweden (Billner et al., 2018). The consequence of emphasis on quantifying immigration news is that it produces a ‘form of depersonalization, homogenization, and dehumanization’ (Carastathis and Tsilimpounidi, 2020: 89) of MEA migrants.

Given the complexity of reporting immigration and migrants without slipping into biased stereotypes that could aggravate the precarity of MEA migrants, this study expounds on knowledge about media and political institutions or actors, and the (un)intended effects that ensue from such power relations. Sobande (2020) explained that ‘media’s weighty influence in society includes its capacity to transmit political positions and reflect structural power relations’ (p. 43). To be fair to Brexit rhetoric and Trumpism on immigration, the target groups are not MEA migrants, but the impact of pronouncements of political actors behind the epochal events of 2016 adversely affected MEA migrants both in policy and media portrayals. Articles in the sampled magazines provided ample evidence of copious references to Brexit, European Union and Donald Trump for good or bad in the coverage of migrants of Middle Eastern and African origins. One way to interpret the effect is that events and context can influence media narratives even beyond the target audience. Such outcome is known as the unintended effect in media research. In essence, MEA migrants are caught in the mesh of media construction informed partly by political ideology that finds audience even in local contexts. For instance, the type of framing and choice of discursive tools for portraying MEA migrants are reflective of political discourse in the public sphere. The studied magazines, we must admit, are cultural products and institutions with veiled or overt political leanings.

‘Seek sources whose voices we seldom hear’ from SPJ Code of Ethics (Nielsen, 2020) raises important issue of ethics and power (in)balance in journalism in general with important lesson for migration coverage. But as the findings of the present study showed, the diversity that MEA migrants would bring appeared missing because their perspectives are deemed inconsequential. Rather than reflect migrants’ voices only when they serve the interest of the media, migrants as sources should be a constant feature of immigration coverage. That way, the press potentially refrains from manufacturing consent (Herman and Chomsky, 1988) and subscribes to Jürgen Habermas’ (1962/1989) philosophy that the media ought to function as a civic forum for debates underpinned by exchange of ideas and equal participation. As cultural theorists and media researchers emphasised, the media is a cultural institution and cultural site for representations (Couldry, 2020; Hall et al., 2012). Consequently, in as much as political ideology, elite sources, cultural contingency and market forces continue to define how journalists assume professional responsibilities, we will continue to experience (un)intended othering, objectification and blatant stereotyping of MEA migrants. In conclusion, we might be witnessing a gradual shift from negative frames in migration coverages (see e.g. Figenschou and Thorbjørnsrud, 2015; Kim, 2012; Megrelis, 2017), but journalists appear stuck on labels assigned to migrants, language of constructing who they are, and unrelenting obsession with elite sources without commensurate professional journalistic gesture extended to MEA migrants. Simply put, presenting migrants with media spaces to contribute to immigration discourse would amplify their voices and potentially help debunk and reframe narratives that dominate media representations of migrants in the news.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

John-Bell S Okoye

Author biography

John-Bell S Okoye is a DAAD sponsored PhD candidate in Communication at Daystar University, Nairobi Kenya. His eclectic research interest spans the areas of media ethics, the changing face of journalism practice in contemporary times, postcolonial studies and mediated representation of marginalised group. He has published in Journalism Practice.

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