‘We can deploy thousands of soldiers’: Legitimization of security measures in the media representations of the European migration crisis in the Czech news media
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Security measures were among prevailing solutions to the European migration crisis that were discussed or portrayed in the Czech news media coverage of the crisis. In this paper, by means of the framework for legitimation analysis proposed by van Leeuwen, we examine patterns of the news discourse on the crisis that aid to legitimation of security measures and policies in relation to irregular migration. The analysis was conducted on the purpose built sample of news stories (N= 20) that were part of the news media coverage of the European migration crisis in 2015 and that were published by one of the three prominent news portals Novinky, iDnes and ČT24.cz. While all categories of legitimation distinguished by van Leeuwen were present in the analysed news stories, in the discussion of our findings we pay special attention to the personal authorization. We argue that lack of critical attitude to political sources and giving prominence to this kind of sources stem from the specific journalistic culture, as well as from the specific notion of objectivity that is embedded in that culture. Our interpretation is supported and contextualized by results of the content analysis that was conducted in order to identify prevailing ways of portraying the crisis (news values, attributes, structure of news sources) in systematic random sample of 558 news items published by the three news portals. |
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