CEU eTD Collection (2022); Heva Davunda Gedara, Dinudi: The Role of Media in Shaping the Discourse Around Refugees in Austria: A Content Analysis of Austrian News Outlets in 2015, 2019 and 2021

CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
Author Heva Davunda Gedara, Dinudi
Title The Role of Media in Shaping the Discourse Around Refugees in Austria: A Content Analysis of Austrian News Outlets in 2015, 2019 and 2021
Summary In 2015 an unprecedented number of refugees were heading towards the EU; this mass influx of refugees was dubbed the ‘refugee crisis.’ Due to the immense numbers of people entering the EU daily, this crisis garnered national and international attention. Some media outlets welcomed the refugees and advocated for their rights, while others questioned their motives and stoked the fear of the unknown and the ‘other’. Using the research tool content analysis, this thesis explores whether certain types of newspapers, namely liberal and conservative quality papers, differ significantly from each other when reporting about refugee related topics. Additionally, this study investigates how the discourse around refugees has changed since the 2015 crisis, offering a temporal analysis. The thesis concludes that in general, the quality newspapers analysed did not differ significantly and with the passing of time, the issue of refugees became less and less salient. These findings imply that although the leaning of a news outlet is important, in quality newspapers it seems that newspapers tend to equally represent the positive and negative sides of the crisis. Additionally, with regards to the temporal factor, the results of the analysis demonstrate that the topic of refugees was regarded as less newsworthy over the years after the crisis.
Supervisor Nagy, Boldizsár
Department Public Policy MA
Full texthttps://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/heva-davunda_dinudi.pdf

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