Negative attitudes towards refugees, asylum seekers and migrants (RASM) are a reality. In the European Union, 58 per cent of people think that immigration is a collective threat, according to the European Social Survey from 2002-2003.
In the UK, a significant proportion of people in this country express intolerant attitudes towards migrants, as shown by the British Social Attitudes Survey’s 27th Report. Common majority sentiments include: that there are too many, that they get too much help and that migration is out of control.
These sentiments can surely be read within the broader context of racism towards ethnic minorities: almost two thirds of people in England (64 per cent) - representing 25 million adults across the country - can name at least one minority group towards whom they feel less positive. The most frequently cited are Travellers and Gypsies (35 per cent), followed by refugees and asylum seekers (34 per cent), according to a study by Stonewall in 2003.
It is clear that all these messages are reflected, delivered and reinforced by the media, but to what extent is the media responsible for reproducing these beliefs? And how do these ‘reproduction’ mechanisms work?
Media representation
A number of (mainly negative) categories of representation prevail in the media, and research has shown that the use of nonsensical terms such as ‘illegal refugee’ (‘refugee’ is a legal status) is widespread. Likewise, media confusion and conflation of definitions is not uncommon. Media discourse has also framed RASM as ‘an economic threat’, ‘a threat to national and local integrity’, ‘a criminal element’, ‘social deviants’ or as ‘illegal aliens’. Needless to say, none of these claims has any basis in fact. On the other hand, research on the effectiveness of the Press Complaints Commission on the reporting of asylum issues found that while asylum continued to receive a lot of coverage, most of it was not hostile to RASM. This report, conducted by the Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees (ICAR) found that national, regional and minority faith newspapers all portrayed RASM as actually or potentially educated, professional, skilled contributors to society, far more often than they expressed the most commonly hostile views. However, the analysis showed a marked difference in reporting between the different categories of papers. The authors also highlighted and questioned the effectiveness of the current system of self regulation in the media. It was also found that most political reporting of RASM policy was tired, repetitive and unquestioning.
Only one perspective
Many stories reflected the obsession with chaos and failed to offer alternative perspectives. This was reinforced by the choice of sources, which were mostly political with few legal references.
Statistics were used in unspecific, including lots of generalised terms such as hundreds or thousands.
Much less frequent is the research on ‘positive’ or counter-representation – one for instance showed the rise of the ‘health’ paradigm for understanding the conditions of refugees. These accounts portray refugees as ‘victims’ and are inspired by compassion. However the trauma framework implies less capacity and ability to take charge of one’s life, which in the case of refugees can, arguably, compromise their rights.
Moreover, discourses depicting refugees as ‘invaders’, or as ‘water’ (as in ‘a flood of refugees’) and lexical choices like ‘failed’ versus ‘rejected’ are not only found in newspapers but also in the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) texts, showing the pervasiveness of dominant discourses.
How the press works
Accounts about the poorly sourced and largely biased (mis)information about asylum and migration is the bread and butter of our work within the race equality sector. But how to move on the debate and offer an assertive response to the challenges posed by this situation?
In my view, the complex discourses and narratives about asylum and migration need to be explored, understood and changed if we are to see real differences in the effects of media coverage about RASM. I would attempt to start doing this by asking different questions: Who benefits when and if RASM are portrayed negatively? Why does it matter?
The media plays a key role in perpetuating the ‘otherness’ of refugees and asylum seekers. RASM often live very separate lives from those of host populations, both spatially and socially. As a result of this distance, a large proportion of people would have predominantly negative media accounts of RASM as their only source of information. Dissenting voices or ‘counter’ discourses do exist, but they are very much a minority, and this is how the media plays a role in reproducing social inequalities. Much of the negative media coverage focuses on marginal issues, rather than systemic ones. Also, the recurrence of a hegemonic discourse that constructs immigration as a threat is not a coincidence. Critical anti-racist discourse analysts have argued that there is a clear connection between ethnically unequal power relations in society and racist ideologies which are reproduced through mainstream media. If we also acknowledge the role of elites (especially news corporations and government officials) in setting and controlling the agenda for public issues, we begin to understand the linkages between current definitions of newsworthiness and the socio-economic interests of specific dominant groups.
Deserving or not?
Demonising certain sections of the poor through media discourse is not a new practice and it has been widely investigated. A classic example relates to media images of the welfare state.
It has been argued that welfare issues do not make it into the news unless they are connected with crime, fraud or sex. Indeed, the extent to which the media emphasises welfare fraud is considerable, and this has contributed greatly towards legitimising welfare cutbacks. A key related point is that the
poor are constructed in a media context as either deserving or undeserving.
‘Deserving’ refugees are those who are not only ‘genuine’ but likely to be educated and skilled, and therefore valuable contributors to society. Meanwhile ‘undeserving’ refugees are those who are - allegedly - likely to be ‘fake’ or ‘bogus’ and who will be, as the argument goes, a ‘burden’ to the (already overstretched) welfare state. This rhetoric turns supported asylum seekers into likely ‘benefit fraudsters’, blurring the picture.
What can we do?
Given the lack of media content of a more critical nature – owing in no small part to the growing concentration and conglomeration of media ownership into the hands of a few – our responsibility goes well beyond moaning about this or that appalling piece of misinformed media coverage. Instead, we must clearly send out the message to those in such elitist media circles that some of the views propagated by their news outlets are not merely misinformed, but straightforwardly racist and xenophobic.
To assert this, however, is to attract immediate criticism for ‘political correctness gone mad’. The facts can, however, easily be demonstrated by relatively simple discourse analysis, and a large body of literature has already been built up on the subject. The problem then becomes one of communication and media influencing.
Though there is no easy answer to this challenge, a start would be to focus not only on influencing those who are powerful within the media who control public discourses, but also to spend time reflecting on the ways in which non-dominant forms of anti-racism are disseminated.
Anti-racist discourse should focus not so much on the population at large, but on those who claim to need it less: the elite class of people who have power over the media. If the most influential forms of racism are at the top, it is also there where change has to begin. Such analysis is not only helpful in analysing the racist structure of discourses, but also gives us a deeper insight into the ways that discourses express and manage our minds.
Gabriela Quevedo
Published in the Runnymede Bulletin,
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