Empathy, geography and immigration: Political framing of sea migrant arrivals in European media

How is European media framing sensitive to events such as refugee border crossing and irregular migrants’ arrivals? While news outlets adjust the tone around immigration following ideology, do the contextual characteristics of these incidents matter? This article explores two factors that could explain the varying framing of these highly political events in European mainstream media. One explanation focuses on the role of migrants’ conditions, such as migrants’ way of transit and subsequent human sufferance (or lack thereof). Another emphasizes the role of geography, in particular the location of migrants’ territorial identification relative to the receiving communities. Focusing on the case of sea migration and small boat arrivals in Southern Europe, I argue that the emotional triggers determined by migrants’ transit and their geographical point of detection systematically moderate each other, and jointly affect how the media describe these cross-border immigration events. Empirically, the article presents original newspaper data from Greece, Italy and Spain that collates geospatial information on immigrants’ sea transit and the related number of injuries and deaths during transit. Statistical results indicate that media framing is more sympathetic to events involving suffering migrants, but that this positive framing diminishes if migrants are located only at the border of the national territory and disappears if the migrants are identified in more distant, foreign waters. The results suggest nuanced conditions in which migration can be presented by the media aside from their ideological lenses.