Book Review: Refugees and the Media: Local and Global Perspectives

A significant book was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan, curated by expert and anthropologist Nasir Uddin, titled Refugees and the Media: Local and Global Perspectives.

This book brings together researchers from various disciplines and continents to analyze the relationship between the media and refugees in different contexts around the world. It explores the complex relationship between the media and refugees by addressing the following issues:

• Should the media side with refugees, or maintain a deliberate distance under the guise of “objectivity” and “neutrality”?
• Should the media consider the “public good” of society and cover refugee issues with more empathy, adhering to an “ethics of care”?
• Is it right for the media to further dehumanize refugees in humanitarian situations?
• Is it acceptable for the media to publish images of refugees in severe crises without their explicit consent?
• Should the media support the state, which is often responsible for creating refugee situations, or hold the state accountable for actions that turn its people into refugees?
• Why do the media portray the refugee situation as a “crisis” instead of focusing on individuals experiencing a crisis?
• What roles can the media play in reducing the increasing number of refugees worldwide?
• What effective roles can the media play in resolving the refugee crisis in different parts of the world?

The media are conveyors of news and perspectives in the modern world, significantly shaping our understanding of global events. Our knowledge is influenced by how the media presents stories, thus playing a crucial role in shaping our views and understanding of specific issues, including all their facets.

Thus, the refugee crisis comes to us as “news” in the way the media wants us to understand it. The media, in both print and electronic forms, depict refugees as an element of “crisis,” and readers ideally accept this as a normative matter, without critically considering what is actually happening in the real world. Consequently, refugees are presented to the international community as a category of people in crisis, rather than as victims of systems imposed by others, especially authoritarian states or powerful societal structures or dominant world states. They are represented in the media according to the desires and motivations of others, not their own. At the same time, media stories are often premeditated according to the political tone and strategic carry of the media house, which is also, in many cases, part of the system.

Thus, the media cannot deny their responsibility in depicting victims as a “crisis” in their representation of refugees. Therefore, the way the refugee crisis is represented in the media also includes media policies that are an inevitable part of the larger arrangement of the global political economy. Given this background, there is an unhealthy relationship between the media and refugees, which has been observed within the broader scope of representing and diagnosing the refugee crisis worldwide.

The introductory chapter of the book outlines the central arguments that pay special attention to the politics of representation of the global refugee crisis. It provides an analytical framework for “representation,” “crisis framing,” and “ethics of care,” with case studies of three major contemporary refugee crises: the Syrian refugee crisis, the Rohingya refugee crisis, and the Afghan refugee crisis.

The role of the media in shaping public opinion and framing policy concerns toward refugee and migrant policies has long been emphasized by researchers in various disciplines. The media can provide a “frame of empathy” and a “hostile frame” for refugees and asylum seekers in migration countries and beyond. In the process of news, opinions, and analyses, these issues are shaped through different media mechanisms, including agenda-setting, storytelling, and perspective framing. By doing so, the process of integrating and assimilating refugees and migrants into host societies may be jeopardized.

Media and refugees coexist discursively, thus complementing each other, as refugees use the media to appear before the global community, and the media (re)present refugees as victims of the state and the system. However, it seems paradoxical that while civil liberalism, human rights voices, democratic norms, and multipolarity in faith, race, and ethnic affiliation tend to increase, the global refugee situation is also rising. Given the outcry, the media play a crucial role in spreading information and framing issues related to refugee conditions worldwide.

The media mobilize global opinions in favor of refugee situations, holding the state accountable for generating humanitarian conditions. At the same time, the media traditionally portray the refugee situation to the world as a “crisis” created by the refugees themselves.

Such criticism of the media emerged when the refugee situation in Europe was perceived as a “crisis” during 2015-2016. This type of media coverage gives the refugee situation worldwide negative connotations. The media cover both “hate speech” against refugees and “empathy for them,” as well as “hostility” in the place of origin and “hospitality” in the place of migration. But in most cases, the media lack the voices of refugees who have sought refuge and have no choice but to accept the fate of asylum. If the media give refugees limited opportunities to speak, they also expose the idea of humanitarian crises to further vulnerability and dehumanization.

When the media publish images of people suffering and in difficult situations, they fuel populist projections of the “refugee crisis” stereotype. At the same time, when the media highlight the perpetrators, it helps the global community stand in favor of refugees and mobilize public opinion. This is how the media deal with refugee issues in terms of several binary classifications: helpers and harmers, friends and enemies, humanity and humiliation, productivity and counter-productivity on local, national, regional, and global levels. Such dual roles in handling refugee issues make the media equally responsible within a broader scope of ethics, human rights, and global justice.