Agency and Power Roles in the Dutch and Flemish Newspaper Coverage of the Summer 2015 European Migration Issue

Given the focus of the Etmaal conference on The Netherlands and Flanders, the present article zooms in on the Dutch and Flemish centre-of-left quality press (De Volkskrant [VK] and De Morgen [DM] respectively) and their accounts about immigration/refugees in Europe during late summer 2015. This comparative study primarily examines ideological discursive mechanisms of stereotyping in the media accounts. It investigates the verbal processes associated with the refugees as well as the non-refugee actors, such as political elites, governmental institutions or NGOs, since the latter receive a larger forum in the media accounts than the refugees. Concretely, we examine how syntax and semantics jointly construct agency, based on theoretical insights from transitivity analysis derived from Hallidayan Systemic-Functional Linguistics. Besides this discourse-analytical approach, a content analysis is also carried out to trace (1) the level of collectivization, (2) the voice given to the refugees and (3) the frames for the refugee actor, based on theme clusters leaning toward either the ‘victim’ or the ‘intruder’ frame, as found in previous studies (Van Gorp, 2005). Findings indicate that the two corpora adopt rather similar representation practices. Whenever agency is allocated to the refugees, it is associated with neutral material action verbs. Hence, no moral panic or threat frames underlie the narratives of these centre-of-left newspapers. However, in both newspapers, the refugees are presented in primarily non-agentive roles, depriving them of power and voice. This lack of agency corroborates findings of former studies into the balance of voice given to the protagonists, and appears to be a consistent pattern over time, thus deserving more journalistic attention.status: publishe