Frame Variation in the News Coverage of the Refugee Crisis: The Romanian Perspective

Abstract

The 2015 refugee crisis has held the attention of Romanian news media, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade, even though Romania is not situated on the main routes on which refugees arrive. Our research focuses on the variation of issue-specific news frames in time, according to media type, and by the countries covered, also addressing the locally salient issue of religion. Articles from the websites of the top-ranked six Romanian news outlets were analyzed, including three quality papers and three tabloids (N=6,183), from 1 April 2015 to 30 September 2017. Using a computer-assisted, cluster-based frame analysis, we identify six primary, mutually exclusive and six secondary, nonexclusive frames: European crisis, context/victimization, relocation/distribution, international conflict, and social problem, national costs, religious issues, US immigration policy, humanitarian/international. The variations in their salience follow the general European tendency toward securitization. At the same time, the emphasis on the issue as a European crisis indicates a tendency characteristic of Central and Eastern European media coverage. Co-occurrence patterns of frames and specific countries also indicate that the salience of some globally recurrent frames varies by countries covered.