Textual and visual analysis of the refugee crisis through four European newspapers

Abstract: The refugee crisis is an ongoing challenge for the European Union. Refugees from the Middle East, the majority of them Syrians, are risking their own and their children’s lives, putting their money –both figuratively and literally speaking- on the chance of surviving the almost six-year long war in Syria.The brutal death of thousands of refugees in the Aegean Sea’s waters was the reason why the EU mechanisms have started to mobilize seeking a solution. The ‘problem’ was not possible to be hidden under the carpet anymore. It was reaching the highly developed Europe’s doorstep.The media coverage of the crisis has started to emerge in a greater extent throughout 2015, as a result of the ‘explosive’ increase of the refugee flows. In the beginning it was just a synthesis of innumerous personal tragedies, before it became an official European ‘problem’.If we ‘leap’ through time and refer on today, we can observe that the massive death toll in the Mediterranean was only the starting point of a vicious circle, which is strongly related with developmental, political and communication issues.Through this thesis my goal was to examine how four European newspapers (which represent both Europe’s North and South) have reported on the biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe since the World War II. What strikes me as a very interesting aspect is that the refugees, as representatives of the developing countries have come in the territory of the European developed countries. Therefore I believe that there is space for a wide development dialogue and I would like to examine at what point the media seized this opportunity to reflect on development issues, through their cover stories.I have performed a combination of quantitative/qualitative methods of analysis. A full scale content analysis of 85 articles has been performed as the quantitative part and this was my primary research method. My secondary method of analysis was about the visual elements used by the newspapers and I have relied on semiotics to examine 141 photographs.