Authors

Polina Klochko¹;  ¹ Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

Discussion

The paper examines the newspaper coverage of migration from Middle Eastern countries to Poland and the European Union in 2015 and 2021. The case study explains how the liberal-democratic Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza framed the 2015 refugee crisis from the Middle East and the 2021 border dispute between Poland and Belarus in its online and in-print archived publications. The study traces the evolution of Gazeta Wyborcza`s migration framing using a mixed-method research design. The frame analysis based on Entman (1993) and Snow and Benford (1988) supplements the R-based unigram and bigram analysis. 

The study connects media and migration studies. It reveals the predominance of humanitarian refugee framing and guest immigration framing in the newspaper`s discursive constructions. The literature review and empirical testing underline the guest perspective on asylum-seeking in the Polish debate, bridging humanitarian view on refuge-seeking and state security discourses. The interconnectedness of media and social frames favours functional replication of other actors` discursive constructions, increasing Gazeta Wyborcza`s reporting neutrality. Meanwhile, the paper also uncovers discrepancies in immigration coverage stemming from territorial proximity and crisis responsibility attribution: while the 2015 crisis coverage focused on war-led emigration from the country of origin, the 2021 border crisis description prioritised the hybrid warfare of Belarus against Poland.