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Visibility without voice : Media witnessing irregular migrants in BBC online news
journalism
Horsti, Karina
Horsti, K. (2016). Visibility without voice : Media witnessing irregular migrants in BBC
online news journalism. African Journalism Studies, 37(1), 1-20.
https://doi.org/10.1080/23743670.2015.1084585
2016
1
Visibility(without(voice:(
Media(witnessing(irregular(migrants(in(BBC(online(news(journalism(
Karina Horsti, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of
Jyväskylä, Finland
Pre-publication copy, published in African Journalism Studies
Volume 37, Issue 1, 2016
Abstract: In the analysis of journalistic representation of irregular migration to
Europe, there is rather little attention given to the variation of modes and genres of
journalism. Most studies focus on text in “old media” and the news genre. This article
analyses affordances of different modalities and genres of online journalism in
framing irregular migrants. Media framing in BBC online news coverage of a
mediatized conflict in Spain, defined as “migration crisis”, is analysed with
multimodal social semiotics. While mediation makes global audiences witness
tragedies at Europe’s borders and the online journalism affords more voice and
deliberation for migrant sources, the frames of threat and victim dominate the news
stories. Frames that depict migrants as surviving heroes who provide for their families
emerge in feature genres.
Keywords: Europe-Africa border, immigration, media conflict, news frame, news
images, online journalism, media witnessing
Introduction
European research on media representations of asylum seekers and irregular migrants
demonstrates that in general two types of news framing – immigrants as threats or as
victims - dominate news coverage (e.g. Erjavec 2004; Innes 2010; Leudar et al 2008;
Lynch, McGoldrick & Russell 2012; Mena Montes 2010, 587 – 589; Moore 2013;
Nordberg 2004; van Gorp 2005). First, these immigrants are framed as a threat to the
society, its moral, order and safety. Portrayals of immigrants as threats link to broader
communitarian frameworks of understanding immigration control (Balbanova &
Balch 2010, 384). These frameworks are constructed as a three-tired framing of
immigrants as a threat: a physical threat to the society and its security, economic treat
often in the form of suspected welfare exploitation, and a cultural threat of invading
values (Innes 2010). The frame of threat is widely discussed in research across
European contexts. This type of representation of migrants as the Other produces
what a scholar advocating human rights journalism, Ibrahim Seaga Shaw (2012, 202),
terms “cultural violence”, a representation that denies human rights and dignity of a
person. Similarly, Alessandro Dal Lago (1999) argues that the media produce a
stereotypical social category in which migrants are presented as non-persons without
personal history and rights. Second, these migrants are also presented as victims of for
instance war, crime, natural conditions and their “culture”. However, this framing is
very selective. Only some migrants are represented as “deserving” our protection.
Oftentimes, cultural proximity and imagined cultural values define which migrants
can be categorized as suitable victims (Horsti 2013). These two framings can have
implications on migration policy in Europe. For instance, Noemi Mena Montes (2010)
2
shows how mediatized attention of irregular migration in Spain as both an issue of
“illegality” and “humanitarianism” set the political agenda by increasing
parliamentary debates along these two frames.
However, previous research on journalistic representation of migrants
has focused on “old media” and the news genre, particularly newspaper journalism.
There is rather little attention given to the variation of genre, medium and to the
factors that shape the new media landscape. New media ecology shapes journalistic
content, production, consumption and dissemination in ways that might have an
impact also on framing. Affordances of participation, accessibility, connectivity,
mobility, and convergence of modalities, representations, productions and
dissemination have shaped the communicative field, including journalism. Emerging
forms of “networked journalism” may provide a foundation for public dialogue that
enables stories about distant others to be told and better understood (Beckett and
Mansell 2008, 92). We are living an era of do-it-yourself journalism where anyone
can set up a blog, web site or contribute to global news flows. Instant coverage and
easier access to visual images in remote locations and marginalised conditions offers
new opportunities to evoke moral responsibility. Nevertheless, the “new” and the
“old” should not be compared as separate but they are highly entangled in complex
networks. Television, radio and newspaper journalism are produced and shared both
online and offline.
This article broadens the perspective of previous research on
representations of irregular migrants and asylum seekers by focusing attention to the
affordances of different modalities of online journalism. I am particularly interested in
analysing how the recurring frames of threat and victim possibly emerge in the new
media environment. How do different communicative modalities support certain
framings? The empirical analysis focuses on online news coverage of irregular boat
migration to the Canary Islands of Spain in 2006 – 2007 and uses multimodal social
semiotics (Kress 2010). This approach allows me to examine social construction of
meaning across different modalities. The visual modalities include design of the BBC
world news website. Moreover, the concept of frame, understood as a principle of
selection and salience, remains crucial. In Kress’s (2010, 10) terms “there is no
meaning without framing”. The results of the analysis are discussed in terms of media
witnessing and the communicative modes of visibility and voice. These modes are
crucial for media’s power in mediating experiences across distances in ways that
demand responsibility and action. As John Ellis (2000) argues, the audio-visual media
has brought a modality of perception, witness, to our everyday lives. This creates
certain responsibilities, because “we cannot say that we do not know” (Ellis 2000, 1).
However, media witnessing needs to be scrutinized in the context of framing since it
too is limited by selection and emphasis.
African migration to southern Europe
The immigration and asylum policy in the European Union countries is
increasingly shifting to supranational decision making, but the focus of
“harmonisation” of asylum policy has been on the management and control of
migration flows, namely on the fight against “illegal” migration, smuggling and
trafficking. Mediterranean irregular migration has been debated at European level
since the beginning of the new millennium, raising both unity and divisions between
European countries. The media in different European countries have reported on
3
unauthorized border crossings in the South of Europe in locations like Italy
(Lampedusa in particular), Malta, Greece, and Spanish territory (Costa del sol,
Gibraltar, Melilla, Ceuta, Canary Islands) since the late 1990s. News on asylum
seeking and irregular migration have generally grown in the 2000s, but specific cases
tend to attract media interest (Gabrielatos & Baker 2008, 18). The Canary Islands case
is one such event that became highly mediatised not only in Spain (Mena Montes
2010) but also in the media in other European countries (about Sweden and Finland
see Horsti 2008). The mediatisation and the Europeanisation of the case connect with
the establishment of the European border control agency Frontex in 2006. Frontex’s
surveillance and push-back operation HERA in the Canary Islands and West African
coast cost 3,5 million euros in 2006. This was the first major operation of the agency
and characterizes well European Union’s reactive policy towards irregular migration.
Frontex’s budget has grown twenty-fold since the establishment, which makes
analysis of mediatized migration events particularly important. Such European wide
financial contribution needs to be legitimized to European citizens, and the media
plays a role in this process.
In 2006, some 31 000 migrants arrived in the Canary Islands in small
West African fishing boats, but many lost their lives in this dangerous journey (BBC
July 2, 2007). A year later the number of arrivals had dropped to 3 000, mainly
because of negotiations between Spain, European Union, Senegal and Mauritania and
the Frontex operation. Immigration to Spain became framed in the context of African
irregular migrants arriving in small boats, although this route makes only 5 -10 per
cent of irregular migration to Spain. Most irregular migrants come from Latin
America and Eastern Europe via normal travel routes and overstay their visas
(Clandestino project 2009, 80). Restrictions in policy and increased border control in
Ceuta and Melilla and the Gibraltar directed migration to West-African coast where
migrants began to take small fishing boats to the Canary Islands of Spain. Tenerife
received 10 000 undocumented people in boats in the first half of 2006, which is
double of the whole year 2005. Travel requires smuggling and contacts to organised
crime. Additionally, the sea travel is dangerous and an estimated 6000 people died in
2006 while crossing the sea (BBC December 28, 2006). In 2006 the issue of African
migration became highly politicised in Spain. In the national Spanish debate the
opposition blamed the government in parliamentary debates, for instance accusing the
government of creating a pull, “a calling effect”, through regularisation programs that
legalised undocumented migrants (Mena Montes 2010, 597). In addition, in public
debate, the Canary Islands authorities demanded support from Spanish government.
Spanish government, again, demanded assistance from the European Union. The
Canary Islands case was also highly mediatised both in Spain and elsewhere in
Europe in ways that pressured governments in Spain and European Union (Mena
Montes 2010; Horsti 2008).
Frontex supported a patrolling operation in which aircrafts and expertise
were taken to the Western African coast to prevent boats from leaving African
shores
i
. In addition, Spain had offered aid to African countries in exchange of
deportations. Spain also launched a television advertisement in September in West
African countries to prevent undocumented immigration
ii
. All these efforts can be
interpreted as attempts to solve the problem. However, the measures are mainly
reactive attempts to stop immediate migration, but they do not solve the problem at
structural level and in long-term basis.
4
Media witnessing: communicative modes of visibility and voice
Media present themselves as institutions of witnessing (Durham Peters
2009). Reporting live on television and mediating correspondents’ immediate
experiences on screen give the impression of immediate witness. Media can position
audiences as witnesses by mediating images and narratives of the events. Through this
mediation audiences become aware of distant events and experiences of people they
would not otherwise encounter. Media can also can bear witness and mediate
eyewitness accounts in their reports. Thus, media witnessing includes witness in, by
and through media (Frosh & Pinchevski 2009).
Media witnessing includes both visibility and voice: agents are both
seen and heard in different modalities of communication. Photographs, graphs, maps,
personal stories in the form of audio, audio-visual and textual display lives elsewhere
to those who would not otherwise know about them. Nevertheless, display is never
neutral, but it is a product of framing: of selection and salience. For instance, images
are taken from a particular perspective in ways that make audiences look at the events
from a certain position. However, display of testimony, whether visual image or
personal story, is not the only mode of witnessing. Display only brings the unknown
to the realm of the acknowledged. Another mode, deliberation, refers to a more
profound witnessing that includes possibility of argumentation, information,
reasoning, discussion and debate. (Cottle 2006, 173.) This distinction between display
and deliberation is close to Shanto Iyengar’s (1991) theorisation of thematic and
episodic frames. News tend to rely on episodic framing that focus on individual
events and details rather than discuss issues through thematic framing more broadly
with a longer timespan and deeper context.
Nevertheless, media witnessing is tightly connected to framing. While
“bearing witness” (Cottle 2006, 182) to suffering can create awareness and
responsibility that encourage the audience to moral judgement and to “do something”
(Chouliaraki 2006, 19), an expectation of this “something” that needs to be done
depends on the kind of framing that is constructed. Repetitive connection of irregular
immigration to crime and social problems, as discussed earlier, can increase demands
for control policy. A study that compared reception between a criminalising
representation and a socially responsible representation concluded that framing had an
impact on reactions towards asylum seekers (Lynch, McGoldrick and Russell 2012).
As an opposite of criminalising and conflict oriented journalism on asylum seekers
and irregular migrants some scholars advocate the framework of “peace journalism”
or “human rights journalism” (Shaw 2012; Lynch, McGoldrick and Russell 2012).
This media policy orientation advocates for journalism that treats issues and events
with thematic frames (Iyengar 1991) by exploring background, balancing between
different views and voices, and offering creative ideas for conflict resolution and
development. Thus, this human rights journalism stresses visibility, voice and context
as means towards ethical journalism. Only through background and context personal
narratives and appearances in visual images can become ethically, politically, and
culturally relevant.
Multimodal semiotic analysis of the BBC online news journalism
Social semiotics offers a methodological paradigm to examine the cultural
resources for witnessing through media. Media witness is always a selected and
