Unequal Framing in Times of Hardship? How Newspapers from Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and Switzerland Portray Syrian and Ukrainian Refugees – Evidence from a Deductive and Inductive Automated Content Analysis

Abstract

The mostly welcoming attitudes toward refugees from Ukraine stand in stark contrast to restrictive policies and often negative attitudes toward refugees from Syria in Europe. By emphasizing certain aspects of reality whilst leaving out others, media framing plays an important role in the public image of both refugee groups. To better understand how the different refugee groups were framed in European media, we applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and a thorough manual analysis and validation process to identify frames from the topic modeling results. We identified eleven generic and issue-specific emphasis frames in a sample of 84,623 newspaper articles from Germany, Spain, the UK, and Switzerland from 2014–2022. The frames were grouped into four overarching frame categories: Fate, Threat, Value and Context Frames. Syrian refugees were mostly portrayed negatively through Threat Frames and Context Frames, whereas more positive humanitarian and victimization perspectives were pronounced in Fate Framing of Ukrainian refugees. The findings indicate more negative and delegitimizing framing patterns in news coverage about Syrian compared to Ukrainian refugees.