Humanizing the Refugee/Migrant Experience

Abstract: The growth of the internet has enabled English speaking channels to make their news accessible in every corner of the world. Simply by clicking on their pages, audiences can see what is happening not only close to them locally, but also in distant places, and furthermore this experience shapes opinions and emotions about the experiences represented on screen. This study examines how the arrival of refugee/migrants to Idomeni (Greece) has been communicated to a Western audience through the news' videos of some European channels. Specifically, it will investigate if and how these videos try to humanize them exploring how they deal with the migrant image for a Western European spectator. Visual and textual analysis of videos has been undertaken, in order to answer the research question: How did two mainstream European news channels broadcasting in English attempt to humanize the refugee/migrant experience, during the heightened period of crisis in 2016?. Various scholarly studies regarding the image transmission of refugee/migrants by the media have been taken into consideration, in order to spot similarities or differences between them and my sample. The previous studies have shown the existence of either negative representations of this group by the media in various periods of time in different locations or representations which humanize them. Regarding the examined videos, although, a very limited number was studied, the findings show strategies used by journalists and film editors to build empathy/sympathy for refugee/migrants and their experiences, in order to bring them in dialogue with the West. It is also worth mentioning that the videos try to maintain a balance as much as possible by stating the facts and showing the suffering. In some cases, the narrative or image might seem more detached but the overall impression is that they try to make a call to the humanity of the spectators, although it is not certain which are the actual reactions of the viewers. Keywords: news, refugee/migrants, spectator, empathy/sympathy, humanization