Frames and Cleavages in Media Coverage of Migration

The analysis reported in this paper is part of a wider study in which we used the Event Registry news intelligence platform to provide a contextual insight into how the media around the world perceived and reported on migration in the period from 2015 to 2022. The analysis was mainly focused on five selected countries during the periods of the strongest waves of the European migration crisis and the adoption of international agreements for their (political) solution. Its main goal is to find out what are the basic tendencies in migration reporting and whether we are witnessing an increasing content similarity or diversification of news about migration in five
different countries and languages: France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, and UK. We analyzed the similarity of media coverage based on the most prominent terms denoting individuals and concepts that appeared in news about “refugees” and “migrants”, and contextual distances between them. The co-occurrence of both terms reveals that different migration periods and events are interpreted differently in the media of the studied countries. The clustering procedures carried out revealed some common cleavages in media discourses about migrants and/or refugees: national, regional (EU) and international (military conflicts) cleavages.