Abstract
The main focus of the research is the representation of migration in Latvian media. In total, 860 publications were analysed covering both Latvian and Russian speaking media content, and the following two methodological approaches were applied: the framing analysis of textual and visual content, and historical discourse analysis in order to reveal the arguments and strategies behind the justification of intolerance. The research data reveals that the framing of migration in Latvian media is left in the hands of politicians and officials. Economic strains and threat argumentation topoi dominate media discussions. The influence of migration is explained and approached from an economic perspective, and most frequently, the intolerance against migrants is interpreted as a failure attributed to the political elite – their inability to solve problems. Intolerance justification strategies were detected in 79% of the publications. This figure confirms that the authors are aware of intolerance not being a virtue nowadays, and the causes of it must be backed up and supported. Visual messages depict migrants exclusively as unidentifiable, dangerous, as a part of an anonymous crowd.
Highlights
In September 2015, the Latvian government was one of the last in EU to decide on the EC plan for the solution of immigrant crisis that intended the increase of immigrant quotas (European Commission, 22 January 2016)
In general, did Latvian media play in the context of representing the immigrant crisis of 2015? What agenda did they create in the interaction with political and public agendas? And what frames and arguments did Latvian media provide for the public discussion of migration and its political references? Our general hypothesis was that editorial strategies and journalistic work in framing and argumentation during representation of migration crisis in Latvian media was developing an exclusive and intolerant discourse because of ideological and cultural assumptions
It is important to understand the focus of the visual representation on migration issues that as this study shows is rather alarming because is more concerned with depiction of crisis, less being about migration and migrants themselves
Summary
In September 2015, the Latvian government was one of the last in EU to decide on the EC plan for the solution of immigrant crisis that intended the increase of immigrant quotas (European Commission, 22 January 2016). It is important to recognize that even if the media representation of emigration process was in part alarming in depicting the financial and economic crisis through people’s stories, it lacked an analytical or critical treatment of government actions, media were supporting government policies by not providing a wider range of arguments for a public discussion between politics and society. What frames and arguments did Latvian media provide for the public discussion of migration and its political references? Our general hypothesis was that editorial strategies and journalistic work in framing and argumentation during representation of migration crisis in Latvian media was developing an exclusive and intolerant discourse because of ideological and cultural assumptions. In this research we aimed to answer the following research questions: RQ1: How conceptual frames of migration in Latvian media were constructed by linguistic and structural means of articles studied – the choice of main topic, fields of reference, word usage, choice of source of information and formulator, and headlines and leads?
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