Navigating News
Out of Place: Refugees Navigating Nation, Self, and Culture in Former East Germany
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Emily Edwards
This paper explores how refugees integrate into German society and to what extent their integration disrupts traditional theories of cultural assimilation utilizing qualitative data from interviews and online surveys with refugees residing in suburban areas of former East Germany. This paper provides a counterpoint to prevailing scholarship on socio-cultural integration that frequently centers itself in urban areas with large existing immigrant populations. Comparing interview and survey data, this work examines to what extent refugees signal the destabilization of a homogenous German national culture by pioneering their own cosmopolitanized sense of cultural selfhood through consumption of social and digital medias. In viewing the self as a reflexive project whereby an individual engages in a constant construction of identity, this paper will argue that integration is not a top-down process whereby the immigrant is influenced by the host society, but rather that integration is a multifaceted process between the individual, local community, and global media ecosystems. This paper views the construction of cultural identity, particularly in digital spaces, as embedded within broader political structures and reads the cosmopolitan cultural affiliations of refugees as indicative of a political challenge made to Germany’s historic ethno-cultural model of national belonging. In exploring how refugees in diaspora articulate a multifaceted form of cultural identity this paper challenges both expectations of communalist belonging in Germany as well as within the diaspora and argues that due to the fragmenting and cosmopolitanizing forces of globalization nation and culture have become increasingly uncoupled.
Framing Migration in the Twenty-first Century: A Cross-National Framing Analysis of Two Mainstream Newspapers - Washington Post and El Universal
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gabriel S Huland
This essay engages with the media discourses around the migrant caravan that made its way from Honduras to the Mexican border city of Tijuana in 2018/2019. Drawing on the idea of news framing, it analyses and compares the coverage of the caravan in two newspapers, the Washington Post (United States) and El Universal (Mexico). The author compiled news and op-ed articles in order to identify news frames and situate them in the context of both countries. This contribution sheds some light on how the mainstream press frames migration in both Global South and Global North countries. The UNHCR estimates that, by the end of 2017, approximately 68.5 million people had been forcibly displaced from their home countries. This unparalleled quantity of migrants is one expression of a systemic crisis that shapes the contemporary world order. Forced migration takes place against the backdrop of civil wars, unemployment, and growing poverty across the world. In response to it, the political elites in many countries receiving migrants have proposed an agenda consisting of increased border securitisation and the criminalisation of migration. The migrant caravan received a large amount of media coverage. On the one hand, this relates to the increasingly international focus of most mainstream media platforms. On the other, it is explained by the singularities of the caravan movement The paper addresses these and other issues, combining the empirical analysis of news articles with a theoretical discussion about migration and media power.
The Effect of News Consumption on Political Trust in Europe from 2002 until 2016: Evidence from a Multilevel Analysis of the European Social Survey
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Roy Aulie Jacobsen
The shift from a low-choice to high-choice media environment has implications for democracy. Through the development of niche channels and audience fragmentation, news consumption is constantly competing with other genres. Television has therefore become a multidimensional phenomenon, where both the amount of television consumed, and type of genres are significant. Those with a preference for news have a variety of options between channels. For an audience which prefers entertainment or sport, the niche channels have the potential of contributing to news avoidance, resulting in a lack of confidence toward the political system. When just a few channels existed, the audience was ensured to consume a minimum of news content. Regardless if they were waiting for the next reality show or through inadvertency. Whether the audience are looking at high-quality media or low-quality media will contribute to their political attitude and behaviour, including political trust. In the current literature on political communication, it is possible to identify three main, and rival, arguments. I will refer to these as (i) the video malaise thesis; (ii) the cognitive mobilization thesis; and (iii) a virtuous circle. Most often, research has focused on factors within a single country, or on one of the three arguments. Research that combine all arguments and investigate development over time have been limited, although the development of the theoretical framework implies a shift. Using all rounds of the European Social Survey, the aim of this study is to give a more comprehensive picture of how the media environment has developed.
