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Download fileThe end of ‘Welcome Culture’? How the Cologne assaults reframed Germany’s immigration discourse
journal contribution
posted on 2021-08-26, 12:16 authored by Iris WiggerIris Wigger, Alexander Yendell, David HerbertControversy over immigration and integration intensified in German news media following Chancellor Merkel’s response to the refugee crisis of 2015. Using multidimensional scaling of word associations in reporting across four national news publications in conjunction with key event, moral panic and framing theories, we argue that reporting of events at Cologne station on New Year’s Eve 2015–2016 reframed debate away from terror-related concerns and towards anxieties about the sexual predation of dark-skinned males, thus racializing immigration coverage and resonating with a long history of Orientalist stereotyping. We further identify an increased clustering of ‘race’, gender, religion, crowd-threat and national belonging terms in reporting on sexual harassment incidents following Cologne, suggesting an increased criminalization of immigration discourse. The article provides new empirically based insights into the dynamics of news media reporting on migrants in Germany and contributes to scholarly debates on media framing of migrants, sexuality and crime.
Funding
British Academy and Leverhulme Trust funded this research in the Small Research Grants Scheme [Grant SG160101]
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy
Published in
European Journal of CommunicationVolume
37Issue
1Pages
21-47Publisher
SAGE PublicationsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The authorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Sage under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Acceptance date
2021-03-26Publication date
2021-06-16Copyright date
2021ISSN
0267-3231eISSN
1460-3705Publisher version
Language
- en