through the looking glass. A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF GERMAN VERSUS UK NEWS FRAMING OF THE EUROPEAN MIGRANT CRISIS

Abstract

Neglect of a country’s local context seems to be a major issue in European news media. European news media outlets often offer myopic depictions of “burdensome” migrants– explaining public and government hesitation to accommodate and integrate the recent wave of migrants. In doing so, news media fails to consider the possibility that asylum-seekers and migrants confer benefits to their destination countries. Consequently, news audiences have few reasons to discuss immigration positively.

In trying to effectively counter news media neglect and promote positive migration discourse, I identify a potentially important country feature: the necessity contradiction. The necessity contradiction describes the opposition of historical anti-immigration policy and attitudes with acknowledgement of a country’s need for immigration.

In general, media studies rely on qualitative research methods in describing news bias in coverage. Only few have studied media bias quantitatively. I attempt to quantitatively analyze patterns of bias in news framing of the migrant crisis, paying special attention a variable I term the necessity contradiction.

I hypothesize that the necessity contradiction (VARIABLE 1) produces a quantifiable increase in the application of positive frames in a country’s coverage of the migrant crisis. Additionally, I observe the effect of a report’s temporal proximity to an event–if the report comes directly after an event’s happening (VARIABLE 2)– and the effect of the type of event being reported (VARIABLE 3) on framing in migrant crisis news coverage.