‘Who contributes more?’ How Ukrainian media construed migrants’ life strategies vs. what the Ukrainian public wanted to know

Abstract

Abstract Having chosen the topic of active contribution to social life, one of the most important aspects facilitating deeper social integration, we present the results of a three-staged sociological discourse analysis of media messages related to migrants and migration. In our study, we consistently used a number of methods — a quantitative and qualitative content analysis, semantic analysis, discourse positions’ analysis, critical discourse analysis, and an in-depth analysis of focus group interviews. The combination of them all helped us reveal specific details of media image constructing as well as requests for information on migrants’ life strategies. We took into account media discourse in fifteen top Ukrainian media over the span of time between 2015 and 2018, focusing on the differences between media discursive strategies based on the form of ownership (state/private), audiovisual type (printed/TV/Internet) and the degree of trustworthiness/popularity of the media among Ukrainians, the actors that had the advantage of being quoted in the media and the groups of migrants being displayed to practice certain active or passive life strategies. The messages with implicit meanings regarding the active migrants’ life strategy were less present in the state-controlled top media and the most trusted/popular top media. Similarly, the messages with implicit meanings regarding both the active and passive migrants’ life strategies featured less frequently in the top printed media. In the context of understanding ‘goodness’ as equivalent to ‘activity’, we found that in the top Ukrainian media there were two ‘good’ categories of migrants: first, internal migrants in Ukraine and, second, migrants from Ukraine (Ukrainian emigrants). However, it turned out that the first place regarding the presence of implications about ‘passivity’ (i.e., ‘badness’) went again to internal migrants in Ukraine. The opinions held by Ukrainians about what the media should have shown were clearly in favor of what migrants were offered by their destination society (thus, in favor of ‘passive’ media image), and all that the Ukrainians would like to see and hear included both favorable and unfavorable objective social life conditions.