Abstract

Local and international media, in their various traditional and digital forms, have shed considerable light on the Syrian refugee crisis caused by the war that has engulfed their country since 2011. The nature and objectives of press coverage varied from one media to another, and from country to country, some of which were linked to political agendas (Zaaroor, 2018, Maharat Foundation, 2016), and others were linked to emotional and humanitarian factors (Alhayek, 2014). Syrian refugees were portrayed in different media settings (Ramasubramanian et al., 2018). The image of refugees in the Western press also differed from country to another (Berry et al., 2015, Efe, 2019). This crisis continues and so is the press coverage with considerable variation in attitudes and trends.This study aims to analyze how the most prominent news websites in neighboring countries i.e. Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey have covered the Syrian refugee crisis, by showing the interest of the Lebanese "Ya-sour", Jordanian "Al-Wakeel News" and Turkish "Turk Press" websites in the issues of the refugees, their complications, the highlighted aspects, and the position of these sites on the Syrian refugee crisis through the topics they focused on and the issues they prioritized.The study showed that the most important topics discussed were "security", "economy" and "politics" and the main focus was on "refugee impact on commodity prices", "difficult living conditions for refugees" and "refugee impact on the labour market". As for persuasion methods, it has been found that the "provocative" and "violent" methods were the most used in the examined press coverage. Keywords: Syrian Refugees, News Websites, Media discourse, Content analysis DOI : 10.7176/NMMC/80-05 Publication date :May 31 st 2019

Highlights

  • Press coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis in neighboring countries (Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon), and in Europe and the rest of the world has been the subject of many Arab and foreign studies and research

  • Research Questions RQ 1: What are the structural elements and journalistic styles, and what is the nature of the subjects, their source and location in the publication of the news websites? H 1: There are statistically significant differences at 0.05 between the structural elements and the press patterns in the press coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis within the sample news websites

  • 5.1 Structural elements used with the subjects of the Syrian refugee crisis The results indicate that the general trend of the most structural elements used in the subjects of the Syrian refugee crisis in the news websites is "objectivity" which was repeated (1328) times (30.8%), followed by "personality" (715) times (16.6%), and the "links and referrals" element (574) times (13.3%)

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Summary

Introduction

Press coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis in neighboring countries (Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon), and in Europe and the rest of the world has been the subject of many Arab and foreign studies and research. Using different theories and research methods, they sought to study, and analyze patterns and methods of media coverage and monitor trends of opinion on this crisis. One of these studies is that of Greenwood et al (2019) who analyzed 811 images, depicting migration from Turkey to Europe in 2015. The report showed a difference between countries in the sources of journalists, language used, justifications and solutions to the refugee crisis. The "humanitarian" topics were more present in the Italian coverage than in the British, German or Spanish newspapers Threats such as welfare or cultural threats were the most prevalent in Italy, Spain and Britain. The report found that the Swedish press was the most positive towards refugees and migrants, while coverage in the UK was the most negative and polarized

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