Mediendarstellungen und -frames der Migrationen. Die Konstruktion von realen und symbolischen Grenzen im öffentlichen Diskurs

The necessity to erect walls and barriers, re-establish boundaries, retaining "waves" of immigrants and refugees, seems today one of the most significant priorities and debates involving the EU countries. Nevertheless, the subject of the border has been one of the dimensions of the entire dominant representation of the migratory phenomenon, over the last thirty years. For example, the media discourse on migration in Italy has been built around the real and symbolic space of a singular boundary, the “maritime” one, as the coasts and islands of Sicily, mostly Lampedusa, facing flows from north Africa. The contribution aims to investigate and deconstruct the mechanisms of representation and news-media construction into two main discursive dimensions: on the one hand the so-called “landing emergence” (external border), on the other the predominant focus on crime-news where immigrants are protagonists (internal border). Through mass-media discourse analysis – mostly frame analysis and critical discourse analysis – we can examine the representative patterns of these two “borders”, constructed in a symbolic and discursive way in mainstream media. The identification and deconstruction of prevalent frames in news representations allows defining the central role of the media in the definition of the situation and in the construction of the immigration in Italy as a “social problem”. The news-frame analysis approach, in fact, allows to point out how visual images, lexical and argumentative constructs, metaphors, etc. define “framing devices” that contribute to establish, structure and enhance the discourse on the Other, not only as a set of messages, but as a dynamic and potentially conflictual (sometimes consensual) field of representations and forces that redirect towards a specific definition and construction of reality, as well as a set of policies.