Content Analysis of News Stories of the Venezuelan Migratory Crisis in Colombia

• In Event: Migration and Restriction in the Global South

Abstract

How are immigrants and refugees from Venezuela represented in the news media in Colombia? While South American countries have experienced unprecedented numbers of immigrants' arrivals from Venezuela in the last decade–more than 4 million by the end of 2019, there is little research examining news representation of immigration and immigrants in the region. The literature on media coverage of immigration has focused on immigration into developed countries (Klingeren et al. 2015 Boomgaarden; Vliegenthart 2009, Chouliaraki and Zaborowski 2017). Very little, however, has been said on media framing towards immigrant groups in the developing regions, where 85% percent of the immigrant population is hosted (UNHCR, 2017).
Previous studies have shown that the news media can play an important role in explaining the policy and public attitudes towards migration (Klingeren et al. 2015 Boomgaarden; Vliegenthart 2009, Chouliaraki and Zaborowski 2017). The general public tends to rely on the news media to get information about refugees and immigrants; in turn, the media framing of these issues shapes audiences' perceptions. Our research question on media narrative matters because it enables us to reflect on journalism as a space where natives encounter immigrant populations linguistically before having direct exposure to them (Chouliaraki and Zaborowski, 2017). Using evidence from Colombia, this article examines how news media in Colombia represented the Venezuelan migratory crisis since 2014.
Historically, Colombia has been a country with high emigration levels due to its internal conflict, making Venezuela one of Colombians' main migratory destinations. The intensification of armed conflict, paramilitary violence, and the war on drug cartels led to an estimated 10 percent of Colombia's population to be forcefully displaced (Dube and Vargas, 2013). However, in recent years, this trend has been reversed due to Venezuela's political and economic instability. Also, migration from Venezuela to Colombia occurs in a context of transition for the country regarding security and politics. In 2016, Colombia signed a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main guerrilla group, taking significant steps towards ending half a century of internal conflict. Despite this, the post-conflict era faces several significant challenges – under development, inequality, and the concentration of wealth—that are exacerbated by the Venezuelan migration (World Bank, 2019).
Our approach employs a content analytical framework to examine the different frames the news media has used to portray the Venezuelan migratory crisis in Colombia. Our data consist of a random selection of online articles about immigration created uniquely for this project in 2016, 2018 and 2020. Data comes from the two most influential newspapers—El Tiempo and El Espectador—representing the left/right political spectrum. For each of the three years, we sample 60 related articles per newspaper, for a total of 360 articles. We focused on these three years because of the availability of survey data. Each year, news media stories played an important role in shifting the public debate, though not always influencing policy-making in Colombia. The empirical choice focusing on these years enables us to compare the national trends and uncover broad and varied narratives surrounding the crisis and its aftermath.
Given our interest in journalism's role in shaping citizens' perceptions about immigrants and refugees, we draw on Chouliaraki and Zaborowski (2017), analytical categories to classify, how in the framework of humanitarian securitization, news stories use frames of victimhood and threat in their narratives. We identify the most frequent emotions attributed to the citizens concerning the refugees' arrival and the current situation–solidarity, empathy, fear/threat, frustration/concern, understanding—and the positive, neutral, or negative framing of refugees or migrants in the news stories sample.
This paper seeks to make two significant contributions to the existing literature. First, while there has been empirical research about media representation of migrants in the U.S. and Western Europe, there is little research about media representation of immigration within the Global South, especially in countries facing ongoing armed conflict like Colombia, where the majority of migration occurs. Second, understanding how the news media has represented Venezuela migration in Colombia helps us explore the extent to which the news media aligns with the "open doors" migration policy and whether the media portrays the prevalent tensions in the public sentiment toward migration.

Authors

• Catalina Vega, Purdue University

• Elis Vllasi, Purdue University

• Stacey L. Connaughton, Purdue University