What is the image of refugees in Central European media?

Abstract

Of late, the national and the international politics of Central Europe have been preoccupied with the issue of migration, an issue labelled ‘the refugee crisis’ by the media. This article examines whether the strong anti-immigrant rhetoric which has become common in the countries of the Visegrad Group (CZ, SK, PL, HU) can also be found in the photographs of refugees produced and circulated by their most popular online media. The systematically designed mixed-method visual analysis, which is applied to pictures from a 1-year period between April 2015 and April 2016, reveals a set of repeatedly displayed visual figures such as a young female victim, children imprisoned behind a fence or a silent mass of bodies. The research shows that these figures are not only common to all the Visegrad countries, but they also significantly correspond to the transnational image of refugees. The text deconstructs a three-part story of the ‘refugee crisis’ and how it was told by Central European online media. It emphasises the stereotypical gender construction of the figures of refugees, links the visual analysis to several theories of the photography of suffering and, finally, provides a description of how a collective symbolic imagination of refugees operates through media in the Central European region.