Story Seekers Media Report 2017
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Research Results

Media stories

Story Seekers Media Report 2017

To discover the stories told by the media outlets from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, we conducted content analysis, using Nvivo, on 9047 articles (titles and leads): 1497 articles from Danish media, 1490 from Finnish media, 2837 from Norwegian media, and 3223 from Swedish media.

 

First, we run a sentiment analysis aiming to understand the “feeling” that the media articles leave with the readers about the issue of migration. The assumption we started from is that the media will treat the topics, most of the time, objectively in perspective and neutrally in language. Conducting the sentiment analysis we observed that the values obtained are very similar for the four countries (see Figure 2, Figure 3, Figure 4 and Figure 5), however Norwegian media seems to provide more neutral texts (sentences) when talking about the migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, newcomers. Positive texts are few in each country – represent 8% to 9% of the total sentences, while negative texts are predominant – present 38% (Finland) to 43% (Sweden) from the sentences. These results do not say that the articles talk negatively about migrants, but these show that they leave the readers with negative feelings about the migrants or migration. The neutral texts represent 32% (Denmark) to 45% (Norway) of the total sentences of the articles (titles and leads).

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Figure 2, Danish media, sentiment analysis
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Figure 3, Finnish media, sentiment analysis
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Figure 4, Norwegian media, sentiment analysis
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Figure 5, Swedish media, sentiment analysis

Regarding the main themes of the articles, the content analysis run for searching the main themes and sub-themes showed, as expected, that the main themes are formed around the words of immigrants, refugees, and asylum / asylum seekers (as we selected articles based on these words, it was expected that these will be the main themes of the articles) (see Figure 6, Figure 7, Figure 8 and Figure 9). However, for Finland, Norway and Sweden, other main themes emerged around the words “Finnish” (Finland) – Figure 10, “Norwegian” (Norway) – Figure 11, and “children” (Sweden) – Figure 12. These could be explained by a stronger localization of the articles in the case of Finland and Norwegian, as most of the references are made to “Finnish society”, or in the case of Norway to “Norwegian authorities” or “Norwegian policies”. In the cause of Sweden, this main theme for children can be explained by a higher interest towards immigrant children – as it can be observed in Figure 12, the most of the references are made to immigrant children “in danger”.

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Figure 6, main themes of Danish articles

1In all the figures presented for the content analysis, “missing data” refers to occurences that could not be manually coded, as there no meaning could be found in the association of words (main word of the theme and the words before or after it). Example: we could not code strings of words, such as “cars asylum seekers”, “refugee gift”, “door refugees”, “shouting asylum seekers”, etc.

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Figure 7, main themes of Finnish articles
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Figure 8, main themes of Norwegian articles
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Figure 9, main themes of Swedish articles
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Figure 10, the sub-themes of “Finnish” theme (in Finnish articles)
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Figure 11, the sub-themes for “Norwegian” theme (in Norwegian articles)
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Figure 12, the sub-themes for “children” theme (in Swedish articles)

Analyzing the sub-themes for the main themes of refugees, asylum seekers or immigrants, it can be observed a wide variety of topics, such as: policy issues, asylum seeking process, integration issues, immigrant children (minors), immigrant women, immigrant men, immigrant family, crisis, refugee camps or refugee boats, religion, issues of traveling, the home countries or destination countries of the migrants (countries connections), positive feelings (examples: welcome, happy, valuable), and also topics that portray migrants as “victims” or “criminals”. The sub-themes for each country, can be observed in Figure 13, Figure 14, Figure 15 and Figure 16.

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Figure 13, Danish media, sub-themes
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Figure 14, Finnish media, sub-themes
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Figure 15, Norwegian media, sub-themes
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Figure 16, Swedish media, sub-themes

As the next step, we identified the most important sub-themes for each country, that in total represent more than 70% of references, see Table 2. Unfortunately for Denmark and Finland, there is also a high number of references that could not be coded (“missing data”), 11%, respectively 20%. In these cases, the strings of words, automatically identified by Nvivo, had no meaning, longer strings (more words to the left and right of the main word) being necessary in order to discover the meaning. However, in each case other five main sub-themes could be observed, and in none of the case “missing data” was the first sub-theme.

 

From Table 2, it can be observed that the media from the Nordic countries are very similar in the topics they approach in regards to migrants. Half of the main sub-themes are common to all the countries: issues related to the asylum process, migrants’ integration issues, and issues related to immigrant children (minors). Then the topics regarding “policy” are common to Norwegian, Swedish and Danish media outlets, and the ones referring to home countries or destination countries (“countries connections”) are common to Danish, Norwegian and Finnish media. Then both Norwegian and Swedish media when talking about migration issues they connect these with the word “crisis”, being one of the main sub-themes when referring to migrants. Also, both Finnish and Swedish articles include in the main sub-themes, when they talk about migrants, the perspective of “victims” – migrants portrayed as victims.

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Table 2, the main sub-themes of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants, per country

Looking now to the way in which the four countries media outlets portray the migrants as “victims” or “criminals”, it can be observed that in the case of Finnish and Norwegian media the two perspectives have similar occurrences, while the Danish and the Swedish media outlets give more attention to the “victims” perspective (see Figure 17). Table 3 present the words most used in portraying the migrants as victims or criminals.

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Figure 17
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Table 3, summary of the association words for immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, coded as “victims” or “criminals”

Analyzing how the migrants are identified geographically, culturally or physically, and what groups received more attention, from the content analysis, it can be observed:

  • In the case of Danish media, most of the references are made to Syria, “non-West” regions and Denmark (see Figure 18);
  • In the case of Finnish media, most of the references are made to Finland, Syria and Iraq (see Figure 19);
  • In the case of Norwegian media, most of the references are made to Norway and Syria (see Figure 20);
  • In the case of Swedish media, most of the references are made to Syria and Sweden.
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Table 3, summary of the association words for immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, coded as “victims” or “criminals”
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Figure 18, Danish media, migrant identity

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Figure 19, Finnish media, migrant identity
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Figure 20, Norwegian media, migrant identity

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Figure 21, Swedish media, migrant identity