Reporting on Refugees in Online Alternative and Mainstream Media in Romania
Reporting on Refugees in Online Alternative and Mainstream Media in Romania

Summary/Abstract: At its peak in 2015, the refugee crisis made the front page of mainstream media all over Europe, dividing opinions regarding its causes, ways of managing the crisis and possible outcomes. Reporting ranged from framing the issue as a source of intra-EU disagreement to the potential security threats it posed or the humanitarian aspects of the crisis. While a number of studies deal with how European media reported on refugees, most focus solely on mainstream media channels. The current research aims to bring alternative media into the discussion, by proposing a comparative analysis of how the most popular online news platform in Romania, Adevarul, and one of the country’s first online independent journalistic projects, Casa Jurnalistului, covered the refugee crisis. The content analysis of articles (N=169) published in September 2015 focuses on the media frames used by the two and on how these frames are enacted via use of primary and secondary sources, choice of journalistic genre and visual support for the text. The findings point to the fact that the mainstream news portal often adopted uncritically the frames proposed by official sources or by international media and news agencies, while the alternative media project grounded its frames on eyewitness accounts and on-the-scene reporting. Therefore, the two work well in complementing one another, but taken separately only offer a limited perspective on the crisis.

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