Abstract

The refuge crisis in Europe has been the forefront of media outlets around the world. Varying national perspectives of political, geographical, and cultural closeness to or distance from Europe can determine the priority that migration receives in the agendas of media outlets and how this agenda is framed. This study uses a multi-depth content analysis of headlines and articles for a thirty-day period to determine how migration ranks as an issue in two large online sources (the “Washington Post” and “RT”). It analyzes and compares how migration is depicted via headlines and in text connotations by these sources. While this study does not aim to investigate any political pressures that influence the reporting by media outlets, identifying how non-EU countries’ political and security relations with the EU are conveyed in the framing of issues by media outlets could help us to understand influences behind further relations.