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Varia: The european migration crisis in polish media discourse: concern, fear and anger
Authors: Waldemar Żak
Number of views: 208
Migration is an objective process that promotes the global development and integration. At
the same time, migration contains a lot of contradictions, the chief being the problem of social inclusion of one
group and exclusion of another. Thus, migration is a process that has a strong potential for conflict. Modern
mass media play a key role in this migration process. Media construct images of social groups and thus influence
the formation of tolerant or intolerant attitudes in the society. In the media discourse, we can observe the
cyclic arousing of the atmosphere of increased social anxiety and the focus of media attention on events defined
as significant social problems. There are two discourse models of the migration process in mass media: the model
of migration crisis (subjects of discourse are locals, journalists and authorities) and the model of pragmatic tolerance
(subjects of discourse are employers and authorities). The article presents an analysis of the media discourse
regarding the refugee crisis in terms of the structure of arguments and narratives of the parties involved in the
media discussion. The aim of this article is to reconstruct the debate strategies appearing in the Polish media discourse
concerning the problem of migration. The migration crisis of 2015 in Europe, and the accompanying media
panic, have drastically changed the prevailing image of refugees among Polish people from stable positive to
clearly negative. The Polish weekly magazines covers were analysed. This procedure enabled to recognise the argumentative
strategies which had been applied in researched weekly magazines and to describe the differences
between them when it comes to developing the migration problem. Extreme opinions are clearly seen particularly
in Polish weekly magazines a cyberspace. Analyses of the „key moments” in the media discourse (fear,
cursory knowledge of the foreign culture, emotionality, unreliable press reports, aggression towards Europeans,
statements of politicians) facilitated the recreation of the phenomenon of media’s creating social fear around
the subject of the migration crisis, and pointed to the nature of its irrationality, characteristic of moral panic. In
an attempt to answer the question whether the media reporting on the problem of immigration create an effect
of “simulated reality,” the author refers to rhetorical aspects of constructing images with persuasive features.