Introduction
Getting the public informed, the media plays a big role in that aspect by dishing out news in various forms and style. According to Charles Dane (1869 – 1897), he defined news as anything that interests a large part of the community and has never been brought to its attention before (www.bogart.cc). However, in the present area of refugee crisis, European as an instance, the media sector have released news that have woken up the consciousness of public in respect to the fleeing of refugees from Syria. The information released to the public are full of issues mixed together.
Outstanding images and motion pictures have been displayed on the severe actuality of challenges being suffered by men and women, how they are stranded coupled with the deadly movement of families on boat traveling from Syria to Turkey, Serbia, Greece and far to the Western Europe in search for refuge. Different media houses have released to the public issues ranging from human factors of the crisis to the security instruments employed by regimes. Some media houses have got whiplash on the issue of refugee crisis for embracing languages that are degrading (Bowden, 2016). Some have mislabeled and misled the public to see the Syrian refugees as migrants. In fact, Al Jazeera at a point was tagging the Syrian fleeing Asaad regime ‘migrants’ before they now changed it to ‘refugees’ after some wide criticisms (Aljazeera.com, 2015). The main dissimilarity between these two terminologies is there definitions and its usage influences the news itself, the how readers perceive the news and government support for them.
To conclude, it is important to note that media spread the balanced and unbalanced news about refugee crisis but a point that needs to be made is that the media remain and represent one of the most powerful, yet least trusted and least accountable institutions, in the world. It is meant to help build peace and social consensus, without which democracy is threatened and to provide warring groups mechanisms for mediation, representation and voice so they can settle their differences peacefully (Coronel, 2003).
Assumption
1. Media reduced the reception of refugee by receiving European State
2. Images motion pictures on media displaying how migrants are stranded and how they move through sea and the death toll made the European sympathy to get higher.
Literature review
According to the United Nations, Refugees "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country" (UNHCR, 2016) while a migrant is “person who is to be engaged, is engaged or has been engaged in a remunerated activity in a State of which he or she is not a national” ("International Migration and Multiculturalism. The MWC – PART I: SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS", 2016). The distinction of refugee not being migrant and vice versa is very important. The act of tagging refugee as migrants means that supports that are supposed to be given by government may be cut off. As a matter of facts, the arrival of refugees has forced political leaders to consider how many they will accept, prompting a range of responses, from Angela Merkel’s pledge to accept 500,000 refugees in Germany to Viktor Orban’s use of anti-immigrant rhetoric in sealing Hungary’s borders (Erbentraut, 2015). It was noted in the introduction, some media especially those in United Kingdom have been warned seriously by the United Nations to put a stop to this misconceptions and the use of hate words (United Nations Human Right, 2016). It was at the period when the image of Aylan, a 3-year old Syrian, went viral that some media began to see refugee crisis as a serious issue. Most alleged media houses put a stop to the use of the words ‘cockroaches’ and ‘swarm’ for refugees shifting their attention to the human cost of this crisis (uk.makesense.org, 2015).
Some journalists believe that their most important area is correct and flawless reporting with no or little worries about the consequences of the issues published. Unfortunately, this attitude might lead to a substandard journalism and possible detriment to the public. This brings us to the meaning of media itself.
Media can be seen as the fourth element in a democratic society, based on the classic separation of powers in a political system, as proposed by Montesquieu (Nordenstreng, 2007:2). It was said that the media as an agent of independent journalism is now part of the picture as a fourth arm of government (Nordenstreng, 2007:2). The simple aims of media are to inform, to educate, to entertain and to mould the opinion of the people; both national and regional newspapers can help restore confidence in the folk by ensuring the flow of desirable information to them (Nasir, 2013:409). Without the media, people in societies would be isolated, not only from the rest of the world, but from governments, law-makers, and neighboring towns and cities and they have the ability to effect change, both on a social and governmental level (Curran, 2010:2).
For instance, in Iraq, media was able to help breach the sovereignty of Iraq, intervention took place to provide security for the Kurds, leading eventually to the imposition of no-fly zones that removed the Iraqi air force from the region, and finally to significant autonomy for the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq (Puddephatt, 2006:7).
As regards language, the media represent a material and social infrastructure for communication among people, and as a consequence, their characteristics quite naturally have an imprint on language (Hjarvard, 2004:75). Media offers more than opportunities for mass exposure to information, events, and associated instances of language use, fictional and otherwise (Stuart-Smith, Pryce, Timmins, & Gunter, 2013:506). It is very essential that person reading, listening or watching news have to comprehend the words, sentences and pictures used. (Van Dijk, 1995:13). Most of these words, sentences and pictures preach hate, rejection and discrimination which becomes a daily activity to activate in minds of idle and innocent minds. Most of hate, rejection and discriminatory speeches have been made through media. Both national and international media cannot be spared of this as they are major agents in this act through the news they convey; how they explain scenarios, when news appear, and whose expressions are contained within. Paying attention to language is important not only for understanding when the media is intentionally deploying speech to escalate tensions, but also for understanding how the media can affect global issues in the regular course of its work (Scutari, 2009:10).
Theoretical framework
Media in the west have mostly succeeded in spreading hate and lies about Muslims and Islam. With political undertone, refugees have been treated as migrants and also allowed to suffer hardship while fleeing from death. At the desperation of saving themselves, most have gone through journey of no return, most have lost their lives while they drown in the deep sea, some were swept to the shores of the sea just as the case of Aylan Especially the Syrian refugee, no one wants to welcome them, mostly European countries are scared of them for being Muslims, a mentality Media has been mostly a cause. A lot of videos have shown Leaders repelling refugees.
Since this study will look deeply into the words, sentences and speeches used by media and political leaders in the Middle East and the West, Critical Discourse Analysis would be used as the theoretical framework for its fundamental concern is with textual orders rather than orders of practice (Myles, 2010:36). It is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context (Van Dijk, 2001:349). What makes this approach useful for this study is the ability of CDA to focus on signifiers that make up the text, the specific linguistic selections, their juxtapositioning, their sequencing and their layout (Jinks, 1997:329).