Production d’identités et modes d’engagement dans les débats médiatiques sur la migration en Europe: Le cas de la Roumanie

Abstract

One structuring aspect of today’s media culture targets the way the media act both as agents and as instruments of identity construction. Taking a socio-discursive approach to the public space, this article demonstrates the media’s auctorial activity in terms of the production of identity and engagement modes. Analysis of Romanian political talk-shows on labor migration in European countries reveals the substitute function of the journalist for political decision-making when it comes to resolving this public problem. These emerging practices exposing political responsibility build on journalists’ auctorial identities, which break down into prescriptive positions. Hence the instrumentalization of the migration problem and its actors through essentialist mechanisms of inclusion and a rhetoric of identity underpinned by a neoliberal agenda.