A cosy consensus on deviant discourse: How the refugee and asylum seeker meta-narrative has endorsed an interpretative crisis in relation to the transnational politics of the world’s displaced persons.

Immigration is a key feature in late capitalist societies, with some 20,000,000 displaced persons worldwide. This paper reports on coverage of refugees and asylum seekers in English-language newspapers worldwide, drawing on media content between 2003 and 2004. It analyses media discourse on refugees and asylum seekers across the world, with a particular focus on deconstructing negative coverage. Five dominant negative frames in international media discourses are identified. These themes are examined in the context of theories of racism and xenophobia to highlight their negative potential for displaced persons and attitudes towards them in their host countries. Theory is also employed to explore the potential utility of such negative narratives for the media and social elites. The work being presented here is part of a much larger research project being undertaken by the authors at the University of Limerick. (For preliminary findings see Devereux and Breen, 2003 and 2004). Introduction The role of the media in perpetuating the ‘otherness’ of refugees and asylum seekers is the focus of this paper. The concept of the other and our understanding of its construction and function are applied to the empirical example of international press coverage of refugee and asylum seekers. Using this data source, we explore the role of the media in excluding refugees and asylum seekers through the production and reproduction of othering discourses. Specifically, we deconstruct negative media discourses to demonstrate their basis in notions of otherness and threat. We also acknowledge the existence of more positive coverage and the potential of the media to promote inclusion. This paper begins with a discussion of key concepts in theories of racism and xenophobia, which inform our analysis. In section two, the linkages between these concepts and media theory are outlined. The methodology informing this paper and the wider research project of which it is part are then elaborated. The five key negative frames identified within international media discourse are subsequently outlined; asylum seekers are represented as ‘an economic threat’; ‘a threat to national and local integrity’; ‘a criminal element’; ‘social deviants’ and as ‘illegal aliens’. Finally, our nascent conclusions regarding media constructions of asylum seekers and refugees are presented. The Social Function of Fear Fear is a powerful emotion. At a primeval level, fear can draw people together, seeking safety in numbers. The group that faces a common threat often benefits in terms of cohesion. Thus, historically a common fear – of flood, of a hard winter, of wild animals has often had positive ramifications for communities, strengthening bonds that might otherwise have been weak, creating interdependence where there might instead have been anomie, establishing a community where instead there would only have been individuals. Our innate understanding of its binding power, is reflected in manufactured fears emerging from the common consciousness – religion and the paranormal providing many examples which are experienced in parallel with genuine threats, filling a void should one exist or perhaps providing a more manageable source of fear in place of the too frightening uncontrollability of external and natural forces. Those in leadership roles have been particularly cognisant of the benefits of a common threat. They have long recognised its potential not only for creating cohesion, but also for preventing dissent and in-fighting – phenomena which not only have a negative impact upon community, but also upon a leader’s hold over power. Thus, fears have also been manufactured by elites to generate necessary or desired cohesion. Closely related to the common threat is scapegoating. Cohesion is maintained through the creation of a scapegoat, which can be blamed for negative happenings. Scapegoats can prevent a group having to face its own flaws – in The Burning of Bridget Cleary, for example, Angela Bourke (1999) identifies fairies as a device used by the community to apportion blame for socially unacceptable events. A communities’ complicit acceptance of a supernatural explanation for a spouse’s disappearance could prevent the necessity of addressing the existence of illicit activity in their midst and the flawed nature of their members. Bourke’s (1999) analysis also evokes an understanding of the function of scapegoating for disempowered groups. For the dependent and powerless, blaming the fairies for domestic violence may have been easier than challenging a seemingly immutable patriarchal structure. In contemporary society also, it often seems preferable for the powerless to misapportion blame rather than face an immutable opponent. False class-consciousness is a powerful example of this. Hegemony is achieved and sustained by an ideology that emphasises that everybody can ‘make it’ in material terms if they choose to. Barry Glassner (2003), in his seminal text Culture of Fear, emphasises that misinformation rather than consciously misplaced blame may, however, be the key to understanding widespread scapegoating. Elites who which to divert attention from their corruption and errors and beneficiaries of inequality who wish to maintain the status quo all benefit from, if not generating, at least leaving unchallenged, misinformation and myths. Glassner’s (2003) text provides clear examples of the reciprocal relationship between the common threat and the scapegoat. The construction of an external threat often employs the devise of scapegoating to demonstrate the immediacy and relevance of the danger, or to manufacture a threat where there exist only uncharted waters, while the scapegoat as a source of blame is inherently viewed as threatening. Both require the creation of a narrative, which elaborates to the in-group members whom they should fear and why. Prejudice, viewed as a social norm to which individuals conform, has been theorised as having its roots not in individual personality disorder, but in a societal need to scapegoat. According to this theory hostility towards minorities is a result of a social system in which: “the achievement level of large sections of the population falls short of the normatively sanctioned aspiration level.” (Hartman and Husband, 1974: 45) Thus someone who has high ethnic status (i.e. is white) and a high educational status, but has a low occupational status, may use a minority group as a scapegoat to explain their status inconsistency for instance they might claim that immigrants were ‘taking all the jobs’. Discrimination, the manifest expression of prejudice, is also not simply a number of isolated actions, which favour one group over another. It is a system of social relations, both individual and institutional that places and maintains power in the hands of the majority. Discrimination may mean denial of access to wealth, education, legal and social protection. It can also mean forced assimilation or segregation (Hartmann and Husband, 1974). In this paper we are focused upon a situation in which the subject of the narrative, the source of the manufactured or artificially inflated threat, the scapegoat, is not a figment of fairytale, but human beings, in this case asylum seekers and refugees. We identify and deconstruct media coverage which create this group as a threat. Our aim is to highlight the congruence between the various elements of these narratives and scapegoating, in order to add to our understanding of how such threats are made palpable and acute for the public. Through this undertaking, we also aim to highlight the enormous negative potential of such discourses for the human beings who are their subject. Bad News Sells … General Panics Run and Run The ‘knowledge gap’ between host populations and displaced persons is key to understanding the significance of media coverage in formulating public attitudes towards asylum seekers and refugees. In addition to the general climate of social distance, which exists between the majority and minorities, asylum seekers often live lives very distant from those of host populations. Opportunities to interact in the same social space are often limited by restrictions on the right to work, where to live and financial deprivation resulting from limited welfare. In other cases, the opportunity to occupy even the same physical space are limited by detention, placement in remote locations and restriction to communal living centres. In Ireland, for example, it was suggested that asylum seekers be housed on specially converted ships on the river Suir in County Waterford. Foucault’s ‘Ship of Fools’ was to become a ‘Ship of Asylum Seekers’. While refugees are not subject to such spatial segregation, they may experience social segregation as a consequences of racial prejudice and discrimination. Whether rooted in spatial or social segregation, the resultant social distance between host populations and asylum seekers and refugees leaves the former with few (respected) routes of learning about the latter, beyond the media. Although the public may not unquestioningly accept the perspective of the media, lacking an alternative, the power of the media’s message is indisputable. According to Benjamin D. Singer: “..it may be argued that the potential for identifiable symbolic content through the media is probably greater than direct contact with the native people (themselves)..” (Singer, 1983: 234) In Racism and the Mass Media: A study of the role of the mass media in the formation of white beliefs and attitudes in Britain, Hartmann and Husband (1974) as a prelude to a content analysis of press coverage similar to that elaborated here, examined people’s attitudes to and definitions of the racial situation in Britain. They concluded that people’s situations, the attitudes prevailing in their local area and the numbers of non-white people living there, determined affective and evaluative attitudes in combi