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Principles of refugee protection in Europe are said to have come under great pressure with the populist and nationalist backlash to the 'migrant crisis', often traced to illiberal regimes in post-communist countries. This paper tests these claims by comparatively analysing media coverage in the UK and Hungary, establishing the extent to which specific norms were challenged or upheld in April and September 2015. It develops a new methodology connecting ethical justifications for migration controls with the 'normative terrain' of refugee protection. The findings complicate existing assumptions about differences between conservative and progressive-leaning publications, and also the divide and direction of travel between Old/New and East/West in the European context. The article challenges the narrative of the 'illiberal wind' and advances understanding of the relationship between political culture and media systems in Europe, and the toxic nature of media coverage in relation to the survival of the normative regime around refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: media; human rights; migration; discourse; resistance EN media human rights migration discourse resistance 379 390 12 05/04/20 20200501 NES 200501 The articles included in this special issue demonstrate a widespread and generalised crisis of relentless othering, evident in the sustained attack by parts of the media and some politicians against notions of multiculturalism, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. Their work shows that as a result of Brexit, EU nationals in the UK have exhibited an increased political awareness and the appetite to problematize the historical context, leading to new political attitudes, reflexivity, civic engagement and micropolitics. The study also highlighted that a minority of EU nationals seem to partially internalize elements of the anti-migrant rhetoric, to adopt majority views in their quest to belong and disengage from the political process, mainly because of the perceived precarity of their position as EU nationals after Brexit and their commitment to integrate at all costs. The examination of the Turkish press coverage of refugees discovered that due to the newspapers' pro-government position they "publish a lesser amount of directly negative and discriminative discourse on refugees in order to avoid criticizing the government's policy on Syria". [Extracted from the article]

How can a cosmopolitan message about refugees be communicated in an international political context characterized by growing hostility to outsiders at the national level? This article provides a detailed analysis of a specific World Refugee Day campaign based on extensive access to internal data from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and interviews with key informants alongside case studies of the campaign in two European countries: the United Kingdom (UK) and Bulgaria. While internal UNHCR assessment suggested successful meeting of pre-set targets, a series of issues around the implementation of message framing and the potential for this to generate action are identified. The article applies ideas about the communication of distant suffering to explore how World Refugee Day campaigns operate as interventions into global public discourse. The analysis of the campaign framing finds that it maximized space for solidaristic understanding of the refugee issue and reflexivity. However, the article argues that the communication of these ideas is impacted by the practical and organizational challenges (and opportunities) of developing a professional communication strategy in the context of a rapidly changing media and political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public debates on immigration have become the subject of much concern, particularly in the UK. This article applies an ethical lens to assess changes in public debates over intra-EU migration in six UK national newspapers during 2006 and 2013. It finds an almost complete dominance of communitarian justifications, mainly based on welfare chauvinism, but a notable increase in security-related arguments and a decrease in economic nationalist ideas. Alternative cosmopolitan arguments about immigration go from rare to virtually absent. The discussion links these shifts to a failure of the UK centre-left to overcome historic difficulties in presenting a coherent narrative on immigration policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour migration in the European Union (EU) has become a hot topic in public debates, particularly around the issue of European enlargement. The media are frequently criticized for stirring up debates around immigration but analysis has overlooked the underlying ethical justifications for migration controls. This article addresses this by developing an innovative approach that applies an ethical lens to media coverage of intra-EU migration. It shows how a generally narrow range of communitarian and cosmopolitan arguments are employed by the press in two European countries that occupy very different positions in the migratory system: Bulgaria and the UK. It finds a convergence of communitarian arguments across the case studies, and a significant importation of frames, reversing the roles of sending and receiving country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]