Strangers ante portas: The framing of refugees and migrants in the Czech quality press

Abstract

This article examines how the two most popular Czech quality dailies framed refugees and migrants during the European refugee crisis in 2015. It explores the extent to which the framing described by previous studies carried out in Western and/or destination countries can also be identified in the newspapers of a country that has had only minimal experience with migration. Instead of identifying frames beforehand and coding them as holistic variables, a routinely used approach to frame analysis, it employs a more reliable and transparent method of hierarchical cluster analysis. The dailies framed the refugees and migrants mainly as a burden on host society, as victims of a humanitarian crisis and, to a lesser degree, as a security threat. The results show that the frames used by the Czech dailies closely correspond to those described in previous research, despite the different methods of analysis and the different geographical and cultural settings.