Visual framing of migrants and refugees in Serbia’s media from 2015 until 2020

Abstract

The research of media presentation of migrants and refugees has been intensified in recent years, especially after 2015 when several million people fled their homes from the war zones in the Middle East and Africa. Contemporary scholarship focusing on journalistic and media reporting on migrant crisis has been mainly researching Western European and the US media context, as well as verbal media narratives of print media outlets. Only a small number of papers examines visual media content, which can have a significant impact on citizens’ perceptions about migrants and refugees. In Serbia, a country situated on “the Balkans route” and which more than a million people from Middle East and Africa had crossed since 2015, visual depiction of migrants and refugees has been rarely researched. Against this background, the paper is based on media framing theory and examines visual framing of migrants and refugees in nine print and online media in Serbia from 2015 until 2020. Methodologically, the paper builds on mixed method research of 469 images analyzed within the denotative, stylistic-semiotic and connotative level of visual media framing (Rodriguez and Dimitrova, 2011), including the timeline analysis of dominant visual media frames and presentation techniques of migrants and refugees in the relevant media outlets in Serbia.