The Depictions of The Refugee Crisis on the Public Arena: An Analysis of the News Frames Promoted by Spanish Digital Media

Abstract

Digital media played a prominent role as a source of information about the last refugee crisis. Refugees leave their countries of origin due to threatening events, while migrants are motivated by material conditions. Journalistic framing helps to understand how refugees are depicted in digital press outfits; it consists of selecting and highlighting certain aspects of reality in a text, so that it suggests a definition for the described situation, as well as their possible causes and treatment; frames have been studied from the perspective of news production as well as that of the audiences; they act as abstract structures that organize the elements of a communicative text, but some of them are issue-specific. A content analysis was conducted on news about the refugee crisis published by the top 4 Spanish digital diaries by number of readers, to describe how they framed those contents over a six month period. They were mainly centred around the journeys of refugees, clearly from the perspective of the European receiving countries. Mentions to poverty and physical integrity won over terrorism and crime, generally pointing to the victims’ frame over their depiction as intruders. The next challenge is to analyse the effects over the audiences.