Studies in Communication Science indicate that repeated exposure to media has considerable potential to shape audience attitudes to and (dis)engagement with reported issues of public interest, such as migration flows. Therefore, this study examines representation practices of refugees in right-leaning elite press narratives of French-language Belgium, the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands at the peak of the EU refugee crisis summer 2015. The discourse-analytical approach probes into the interpretative aspects of the news content by examining representation practices like collectivization/individuation of the protagonists and assignment of positive/negative semantic roles to the refugees, thereby giving/depriving them of agency and potentially enlisting readers’ compassion or creating a discourse of moral panic. To see whether the refugees have become the object of politicization, we also explore the semantic roles assigned to the three most frequently mentioned non-refugee actors common to the four newspapers (the EU, Germany and Hungary). © 2018 Intellect Ltd.

Agency Refugee media coverage Collectivization Discursive construction Transitivity analysis Semantic roles Representation practice

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