The Discursive Strategies Used in Representing Refugees in the British News Media: A Critical Discourse Approach

Abstract

This study examines the discursive strategies employed in some British newspapers concerning their reports on Ukrainian refugees. While prior research has shown that news media has adversely portrayed non-European refugees, this study is distinct in that its research sample is exclusively European refugees. The basic goal was to show how the mainstream media depicted the Ukrainian immigrants arriving in the UK. The data was gathered from 64 articles about Ukrainian refugees, released in four UK mainstream news outlets between April 2022 and August 2023. The data was analyzed into six analytical categories within the Discoursal Historical Approach (DHA) framework: discourse references, subject-predicate combinations, argumentations, perspectivising discourses, repair strategies (mitigation), and intensification. The study findings showed that all four media outlets, irrespective of their respective ideologies, regularly utilized the discursive techniques of individualization and humanization, thereby establishing a widely accepted and constructive arguing strategy regarding Ukrainian refugees. Prevalent approaches portray Ukrainian refugees in a favorable light. Despite the country's media's generally negative representation of third-world refugees, the results of this study show that the British press purposefully depicted Ukrainian migrants in a positive and sympathetic light. This sets the study's findings apart from those of previous studies. It is believed that the media's ideological stance toward Eurocentrism and warped racial ideas constituted a major role in shaping how European and non-European migrants were portrayed in news reports.