The Discourse of Migration in English-language Online Newspapers: An Analysis of Images

Abstract

This paper examines English-language online newspapers from the UK, the USA and Australia and analyses the images of news articles about migration. To do so, the newspapers The Guardian, USA Today and The Sydney Morning Herald have been chosen and news articles collected in August 2016. The corpus consists of 650 news articles comprising about half a million of words. From these, 1,300 images have been extracted, sorted into migration- and not migration-related images and then grouped thematically. Selected and high-frequency categories are examined in more detail, example images analysed more closely, and patterns found and common characteristics are discussed. Investigating a larger image corpus is rare in discourse analysis and is still missing for migration-related issues.

Keywords

• migration
• refugees
• asylum seekers
• immigrants
• images
• discourse analysis
• online newspapers