Moral Framings of the Refugee Crisis in Danish News Articles and Facebook Comments

The next speaker at ECREA 2018 is Deniz Neriman Duru, who begins by highlighting the role of the news media as presenting moral guidelines for their audiences, here especially in the context of the edit framing of the European refugee crisis. This can be studied usefully by examining the linkages between mainstream media framing in and social media reactions to news media articles.

The project collected data on article comments on Facebook in September 2015, at the peak of the refugee crisis, in the pages of Danish news outlets, examining the content of articles and of the threads attached to the five most liked user comments. A key focus here is on the distance between reporters and commenters on the one side, and refugees on the other, that is expressed in these texts. As the crisis continued and refugees appeared in European host countries, such distance is further complicated by increasing conviviality between domestic populations and newly-arrived refugees. This also relates to political rhetorics of integration and assimilation or distinction and exclusion, and is often expressed in affective rather than merely rational form.

The various news outlets framed the refugee crisis in line with their underlying ideologies: as an open-ended question, as a threat to Danish national identity and cohesion, or as a compassionate challenge for civil society; this is expressed both in the article texts as well as in the accompanying visual content. Key themes in such articles are frequently crisis and chaos; national self-perception; and solidarity.

User comments range from pro-refugee through ambivalent to anti-refugee sentiment, and ambivalent comments often express a ranking of refugees according to their deservingness. Some pro-refugee commenters respond to such utilitarian views with anger or shame, while anti-refugee commenters express strongly negative sentiments and reject any responsibility. There are also varying concerns about the refugees’ ability to integrate into Danish society; all of this can be understood as a discussion of the perceived distance between Danes and refugees. Such debate is largely independent of the news outlets’ initial framing.