A Great Divide: Polish media discourse on migration, 2015–2018

The widely described migration crisis in Europe took place in 2015–2018. Like any major event, it was covered by the media in a variety of ways. While one could find analyses of the related media content for many European countries, a comprehensive study for Poland has not been previously conducted. This paper describes the Polish media’s divided positions on migration from 2015 to 2018. The media content analysis was based on the monitoring of the press, television, and the Internet. The following research techniques were used: (1) a summary of the number of messages over particular months to show the intensity of the phenomenon, (2) quantitative analysis employing corpus linguistics (CL), (3) qualitative analysis using critical discourse analysis (CDA). The analyses revealed a sharp divide between conservative and liberal discourses. These differences—tone, sentiment, and subject matter—were apparent in how the migration crisis was described. Conservative media only showed negative aspects of migration, and if there were no such issues in Poland, protests against migrants in Europe became their chosen topic. Liberal media much more often referred to the specificity of migration to Poland (economic migration from Ukraine) and showed the need for solidarity with migrants. However, the dominant difference was the political sympathies of individual media. We have shown divisions in media coverage based on this very factor. Tabloid coverage was not associated with any political party; it criticized the actions of the government and the opposition. However, the most critical perspective from which we want to describe the collected material is the securitization of migration. The subject of security is present in each analysed discourse, regardless of political divisions. Our research shows though that the intensity of threats is more significant in the right-wing press.