In order to gain a solid background on our project topic, we conducted a literature review of seven different sources. These sources include government publications, reports and journal articles which analyse the language used by British newspapers to describe the European Refugee Crisis. The literature review gives us an overview of the topic and acts as a stepping stone for our own project.

 

    

    Over the past years, the media coverage of the European Refugee Crisis (ERC) in the British and international media has been extensive. The discourse attracted considerable attention from various individuals (Fotopoulos and Kaimaklioti, 2016). Academics, organisations and governments conducted language analyses of the news reports surrounding the ERC. They used certain datasets and methodologies to do so. The results obtained, concerning different aspects of the language employed by the media, vary greatly. 

 

   Several academic researchers have relied on the archiving services Nexis and Factiva to obtain their data (The Migration Observatory, 2016), (Berry, Garcia-Blanco and Moore, 2015), (Crawley, McMahon and Jones, 2016). These databases provide full-text versions of British and international newspapers and periodicals. Researchers conducted quality checks on the databases, to ensure that no systematic errors or gaps existed in the data provided (The Migration Observatory, 2016). It appears that few research papers used data from qualitative interviews to analyse the language used to describe the ERC in newspapers (Crawley, McMahon and Jones, 2016).

 

    The methods used to analyse the language in British newspapers vary greatly from one paper to another. Some researchers used a coding framework for the analysis, while others proceeded with a manual analysis. Some of the language analysis methods employed include frequency analysis, collocational analysis, manual content analysis, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, keyword analysis, frame analysis and semantic prosody analysis. Generally, most papers looked at the most prevalent themes, most frequently used terms, the tone and associations between words in the media reports. Some researchers, such as Crawley, McMahon and Jones (2016) utilised qualitative material from stakeholder interviews and focus groups to contextualise and interpret the quantitative results of their language analysis.

 

   Different researchers approached the problem from different angles. Some compared the language used in British media sources from different political spectrums. Others compared the language of tabloids to that of quality newspapers (The Finnish Institute in London, 2017). Some looked at the trends in the language in context of the world events or in a political context (The Migration Observatory, 2016). Another approach was to examine how the language in the British media changed over time. The time period of the analysis varied greatly. Some sources analysed newspaper articles over a period of years, others over months and some even only over a few weeks. It appeared to be quite common for some papers to compare the language used in the British media to that of other countries (Berry, Garcia-Blanco and Moore, 2015). A different number of news outlets and individual articles were used in each analysis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Both similarities and differences exist in the conclusions of the papers and in the nature of the findings. Several papers concluded that the British press focused on describing the ERC in terms of its scale (Boeva, 2016). Media reports focused on the ‘numbers’ of the crisis (Fotopoulos and Kaimaklioti, 2016) and ‘mass’ was found to be the single most common way of describing immigration in 2015 (The Migration Observatory, 2016). Several reports also agree that the discourse surrounding the ERC evolved over time. The Migration Observatory (2016) stated that the frequency of specific words associated with immigration has changed over time, for instance. 

 

    Nevertheless, there are also several contradictions in the findings of the papers. Berry, Garcia-Blanco and Moore (2015) concluded that there were differences in the language used by British media sources from different political spectrums. Contrastingly, Boeva (2016) stated that there are no striking differences in the representation of refugees by conservative and liberal British sources.

 

    Also, different papers disagreed on which term was most commonly used in British newspapers to describe people coming to Europe from other countries. Boeva (2016) found that the term “refugees“ was the most popular one during the time period of September 2015 in the Daily Mail and the Guardian. On the other hand, Berry, Garcia-Blanco and Moore (2015) concluded in their report that the term “migrant“ was the most used term in the British newspapers The Guardian, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, Sun and Daily Mirror between 2014 and early 2015.

 

    Another major difference in findings is that some papers report that there are wide variations in how the press in different countries report on the ERC (Georgiou and Zaborowski, 2017). One study, for example, found that compared to four other European countries, the UK had the most negative media coverage of the ERC, whilst Sweden had the most positive one (Berry, Garcia-Blanco and Moore, 2015). This finding contradicts the conclusions of the journal article by Fotopoulos and Kaimaklioti (2016), which states that European media seems to have taken a uniform approach to covering the ERC. When comparing the conclusions drawn by different researchers it is important to acknowledge that the research may have been conducted at different time periods of the ERC and using different news outlets. 

 

    In conclusion, there exists extensive academic research which analyses the language of the media discourse surrounding the ERC in various different ways. Nevertheless, certain gaps still remain within the literature. In the future, it would be interesting to analyse a greater number of newspaper articles from a greater range of sources. The analysis should be conducted over a longer time period. Articles published before the ERC up to articles published at the current date could be analysed. Also, it could be intriguing to consider the visual aspect of media reports. Research could explore how visuals and text complement each other to create a description of the ERC (Boeva, 2016). Another path that has not yet been thoroughly examined is how the description of the ERC shapes or reflects public attitudes towards the crisis (The Migration Observatory, 2016). 

 

 

Through our project, we hope to validate existing findings and fill some of the gaps in the wider academic and popular debate on the subject.