REMINDER

The 2015 “refugee crisis” and the 2016 “Brexit” referendum placed migration and EU freedom of movement at the heart of media and political debates around the EU. To address these issues, the REMINDER project, a major international analysis of migration in and around the EU, brought together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to investigate the social and economic consequences of migration and how they are understood and debated in public.

As a part of this project, the European Journalism Centre — working with the University of Oxford and Budapest Business School — carried out analysis of media practices in nine EU member states. This work explored not only how journalists perceive the national narratives around migration that they themselves help to generate, but also what is hidden behind the scenes — the presumptions, processes, norms and pressures that they face on a daily basis in their work.

The analysis considers how the newsroom practices may differ from country to country, media-type to media-type and also what these different approaches mean for migration debates and democracy within the countries themselves, and also more broadly around Europe. This kind of comparative analysis of media practices is unusual since it builds on both previous work on the migrants in European news-making practices, and on older analyses of the sociology of the newsroom.