Understanding Media Portrayal of Rohingya Refugees

Abstract

The chapter examines the media representation of Rohingya refugees in India. Media is playing a significant role in building consensus and shaping people’s perception of modern nation-states. The ability to control the symbolic resources enable mass media to build consensus and shapes people’s perception to manufacture consent. The representation of minority ethnic refugee communities by the mass media is an appropriate illustration of manufacturing consent. Media, is instrumental in providing platform to a particular ideology of nationalism through the dynamics of interplay of discourse and ideology to constructs image of refugees, and migrants as the “other” within the nation state. At times it disproportionately amplifies refugee issues to construct public discourse against them. This paper studies Rohingyas, an ethnic minority group of Myanmar facing execution from the dominant Buddhist community, to analyse the construction of public imagery in visual media in India. The paper argues visual media facilitates the construction of negative image of Rohingyas and shape public imagination around narratives of nationalism.