When Russia escalated the conflict in Ukraine in 2022 to a full-scale invasion, one of the consequences was a refugee crisis, with the amount of Ukrainian refugees drastically increasing. Gizem Melek, Kübra Geysi, and Zeynep Nur Sarı from Queen’s University Belfast did a content analysis of eight news outlets to explore how media in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Türkiye framed the Ukrainian refugee crisis.
According to the authors, there is a distinction between ‘European’ and ‘non-European’ refugees, and the positive (pro-Ukraine) coverage of the Ukrainian refugee crisis has led to widespread welcoming of the Ukrainian refugees on civic and political level, unlike the response to the 2015 refugee crisis spurred by the crisis in Syria.
This discrepancy is not without its critics, as critics of Western media outlets have accused the media as favoring white, Christian Ukrainian refugees over the “uncivilized” and “uncontrollable” Iraqi, Syrian, and Afghan refugees. This discrepancy suggests that European refugees are more worthy of favorable treatment.
A cross-country analysis including Türkiye, a country that has maintained a more neutral stance towards the conflict, whereas Western countries are nearly uniformly pro-Ukraine, was conducted to study how the refugees from Ukraine were framed.
Entman’s (1993) classic framing theory was at the foundation of the theoretical framework. The first research question was as follows: RQ1: How did media outlets in the US, UK, Germany and Türkiye frame the Ukrainian refugees during the initial stages of the Russia-Ukraine conflict?
This was complimented by the second research question: RQ2: Do media outlets in different countries employ varying framing strategies?
To capture diverse media within different media systems (Hallin and Mancini 2004), these eight news outlets were chosen: USA Today and Associated Press (AP) in the US, The Guardian and Reuters in the UK, Anatolian Agency (AA) and Hürriyet in Türkiye and the English-language editions of Der Spiegel and Deutsche Welle (DW) in Germany. Over a thousand (N=1211) news articles were collected.
There were 8 different frames in the categorization: economic threat, cultural threat, security threat, economic benefit, cultural affinity, victim, humanitarian aid, and military support. The “victim” frame (48,2%) and “humanitarian aid” (31,7%) were clearly the most common frames.
Positive frames vastly dominated the media in all the countries (97%), while negative “threat” frames were relatively rare (3% or 47 instances). Cultural affinity was vastly more common than cultural threat, which did occur in The Guardian minimally (N=4).
The British media, in contrast to the others, was also willing to portray Ukrainian refugees as a security threat. This aligns with previous studies showing that victim and perpetrator are not mutually exclusive in the British media.
In the US, “humanitarian” and “military aid” frames were somewhat more common, reflecting the role of the country in offering massive support and aid. In Türkiye, the “cultural affinity” frame was significant – reflecting the tendency of the Turkish media to emphasize positive aspects of news stories.
In summary, while refugees are generally considered as potential threats, the Ukrainian refugees were a notable exception: the “threat” frames were exceedingly rare. Also notable was the presence of the “cultural affinity” frame across countries. Thus, in line with critics, the study highlighted the importance of ethnicity and origin in news frames.
The article “Framing the Ukrainian refugee crisis: A cross-country media analysis during the early Russia-Ukraine conflict” by Gizem Melek, Kübra Geysi, and Zeynep Nur Sarı is in Global Media and Communication. (Open access).
Picture: Untitled by Anastasiia Krutota.
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