La production médiatique d’une « crise migratoire »

Abstract

If the agenda-setting terms of discussion of international mobility in 2015 were « refugee crisis », the absence of any abrupt change in the migration system suggests that the « crisis » stemmed from media representations. Taking a corpus of online Press materials, with a global and multi-lingual scope, our analysis practises reading at a distance, and a geographical approach, in order to broach the spatial and temporal dimensions of the media’s highlighting of migration. The temporal variations in information flow concerning migration prove to be linked to the quantitative changes in the spatial content of the representations of the migratory situation (the geographical coverage concentrated on the EU and the Eastern Mediterranean). Due to these links, examined here with attention to the production of geographical imaginaries and to differences of scale, a global geopolitical upheaval in migration was identified.

Keywords

• migrations
• crisis
• press
• media agenda
• geopolitics
• Europe