Refugees and migrants, mostly from Afghanistan, walk towards a transit centre on the Macedonian border in February 2016. Boris Grdanoski/Press Association. All rights reserved.
While it is now more common for “the refugee crisis” to be referred to in the media as last year’s affair, 2016 has been the deadliest year for refugees trying to reach Europe by sea. Only the recorded deaths in the Mediterranean present a chilling reality – and yet, this reality rarely makes headlines. Has journalism forgotten its mission? Has the public grown numb? When does crisis become a crisis? Our cross-European study of the press in 2015 sets the stage to engage with these questions and reveals a political and ethical predicament that touches upon the core values of Europe.
Our research of broadsheet press in eight European countries in the east and the west of the continent analysed 1200 stories on the “refugee crisis” unfolding in the period immediately after three key events in 2015: European leaders agreeing on refugee quotas in July; the publication of images of Alan Kurdi’s tragic drowning in September; and the Paris terrorist attacks in November. The narratives we recorded were rich and revealed a complex picture that had temporal, ideological, and geographical particularities and differences in the coverage of the crisis.
