The Mediatisation of Migration Issues During the ‘Refugee Crisis’: A Comparative Case-Study of the UK, Denmark and Germany

Abstract

Spurred on by civil war in Iraq, Libya and Syria and by instability in several African countries, more than 1.8 million migrants/refugees arrived in the EU in 2015. This massive pressure from immigrants and refugees led to a humanitarian crisis on a global scale while threatening the key instruments of border control in the EU and, at the same time, increasing uncertainty about the political, economic and societal implications for member states. The ‘crisis’ was highly politicised in domestic politics owing to the heightened salience in media coverage, the mobilisation of citizens holding exclusive nationalist identities by mostly right-wing populist parties and exacerbated polarisation in public debates. In such circumstances, popular disapproval of the EU’s management of the crisis grew and provided a suitable platform for the growth of anti-EU and anti-refugee/immigrant discourses, in which the domestic mass media played a major role by reflecting these tendencies and shaping public opinion concerning the ‘crisis’. Employing a comparativist methodology, this chapter investigates how migration issues were mediatised during the ‘refugee crisis’ in three different countries – the UK, Denmark and Germany – and the consequent implications.