[Pants-of-dog]

I see, the capitalists have forced the journalists to dupe the public in a secret conspiracy to destroy the working class by importing migrants.

Please note that this conspiracy theory treats journalists and migrants as idiots without agency.

And I am certain that Kaiserschmarrn does not need your help as she is making an argument that is not as ridiculous as yours.

[One Degree]

I see, the capitalists have forced the journalists to dupe the public in a secret conspiracy to destroy the working class by importing migrants.

Please note that this conspiracy theory treats journalists and migrants as idiots without agency.

And I am certain that Kaiserschmarrn does not need your help as she is making an argument that is not as ridiculous as yours.

I don’t see anything secret about it. Unfortunately, large numbers of people only think what they are told to think. This makes journalists and migrants neither more nor less gullible than others, but the result is the same. Journalist should have the knowledge to tell they are being manipulated, but I see no evidence they are being hired for their knowledge. They are either gutless or ignorant.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

My point is very simple.

You are arguing that journalists have an agenda.

I am pointing out that they have no reason or motive for this agenda.

It seems odd to argue that people will engage in long term, complicated, difficult efforts for no apparent reason.

I explained this already but obviously you are not convinced which is not entirely unexpected. If we start going in circles, as the above indicates, I'm not going to repeat myself.

Why would anyone need an agenda to point out that the migrants are both economic migrants and refugees?

I never claimed that one had to have an agenda either. You are always quick to point out logical fallacies but you are among the worst posters when it comes to straw men. Would you stop making up positions which I have never assumed?

[Pants-of-dog]

As long as we agree that there is no reason to assume journalists, or anyone else, were trying to supoort some agenda by calling the migrants “refugees”.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

We could agree on that if we looked at it in isolation and if that conflation in terms was the only issue.

Going back to the refugee crisis, where this was most obvious and blatant to any neutral observer, the term refugees was used even during the first half of 2015 when the majority of asylum seekers originated from the Balkans and weren't fleeing anything. The FAZ, a self described centre-right publication, explained at the time that they were fleeing crappy conditions in their own countries. It also claimed at one stage that people were fleeing Hungary. If guess that makes them refugees for people with left wing sensibilities. The publicly funded TV channels also had one soppy and emotional piece after the other in their news segments. It's probably only dumb right-wingers like myself who expect news to be factual. Overall, as mentioned before, the reporting had an overwhelmingly positive spin.

I'm sure most people thought they were doing good work, thinking it was justified in part by not giving an opening to the right who, so they would argue, would exploit it. This is a general sentiment that is pervasive across pretty much all respectable publications. They regard their actions as defensive and necessary against an anticipated right-wing agenda the existence of which is a generally accepted truth (while the reverse is obviously a "conspiracy theory" or similar, as you seem to say in this thread). This invariably leads to tendentious reporting, where certain facts and data is not reported at all or put into a left-wing or progressive context, and it can only happen if the majority of people reporting and deciding what is published and how is largely on the same page.

[Pants-of-dog]

https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_404384_en.pdf

In recent months asylum seekers have once again become front page news in many British newspapers with headlines including: „It‟s good but I don‟t like the food says asylum seeker: 130 migrants move into top hotel‟ (Daily Express, 25th September 2014). While this may reflect a broader increase in stories about immigration making headline news it is also reminiscent of press coverage of forced migrants at the start of the 21st century. This article explores the way in which asylum seekers and refugees have been discursively constructed by the print media in both the UK and Australia between 2001 and 2010. 40 articles were selected for analysis following a discursive psychological approach (Potter and Wetherell, 1987). It was found that the print media, in both the UK and Australia, draw on a number of interpretative repertoires when constructing accounts of refugees and asylum seekers. The principal repertoire found to be used was that of the „unwanted invader‟, which was achieved through the use of metaphors of criminals and water. However, this repertoire was found to be used differently in both media; in Australia the focus was on border protection and keeping „these‟ people out of the country, whereas in the UK the repertoire was used predominantly to convince the reader that refugees and asylum seekers needed to be removed from the country. Consideration is also given to how these accounts changed over the period and what the implications may be now that the topic has once again returned to the front pages of our daily newspapers.

So, in the years between 2001and 2010, the predominant discourse in media was that migrants were invaders who had to be kept out or removed.

This directly contradicts any claims that the media is trying to make everyone think these migrants are refugees.

While it is possible that the media turned itself completely around in the period from 2010 until now, that is unlikely.

Some studies are beginning to appear:
https://rm.coe.int/media-coverage-of-th ... 168071222d

Executive Summary
1. European press played a central role in framing refugees’ and migrants’ arrival to European shores in 2015 as a crisis for Europe. While coverage of “the crisis” is characterised by significant diversity, overall, new arrivals were seen as outsiders and different to Europeans: either as vulnerable outsiders or as dangerous outsiders.
2. Regional trends: There are significant differences in the coverage across European regions. Especially at the beginning of “the crisis”, and to an extent throughout it, there was a stark contrast between media coverage on the West and the East and especially, between media in the receiving and non-receiving countries.
3. Temporal trends: the narratives of the coverage changed across Europe during 2015. The sympathetic and empathetic response of a large proportion of the European press in the summer and especially early autumn of 2015 was gradually replaced by suspicion and, in some cases, hostility towards refugees and migrants.
4. Media trends: Press coverage that promoted hate speech and hostility towards migrants and refugees was systematic and persistent in a proportion of the press. This was especially the case in some parts of Eastern Europe (esp. Hungary), throughout “the crisis” and in a significant section of some countries’ right-leaning press in the East and West Europe alike.
5. Voice: Refugees and migrants were given limited opportunities to speak directly of their experiences and suffering. Most often they were spoken about and represented in images as silent actors and victims. There were some significant exceptions, but these were time and place specific.
6. Gender: Female refugees’ and migrants’ voices were hardly ever heard. In some countries, they were never given the opportunity to speak (e.g. Hungary) while in other cases (e.g. Germany) they were only occasionally given this opportunity.
7. Context: Overall, media paid little and scattered attention to the context of refugee and migrant plight. There was little connection between stories on new arrivals and war reporting or between stories on refugee plight and international news stories from their countries of origins. In addition, little and scattered information was made available to the public about migrants’ and refugees’ individual stories, their lives and cultures; thus information about who these people actually are was absent or marginal in much of the press coverage in most European countries.
8. As the “refugee/migration crisis” is entering a new phase, media continue to face significant challenges in safeguarding the values of independent and fair journalism, while respecting freedom of expression for all and tackling hate speech in Europe. Self-regulatory and international bodies and organisations need to support media in these efforts.

So , it seems that while a large portion of the press started off sympathetic and then became hostile to the migrants, a significant portion of the press was consistently hostile to the migrants.

Some things were more consistent: lack of refugee or migrant voices, lack of context for the reasons behind the migration, and they were always portrayed as outsiders.

It seems that it would be incorrect to claim that most of the media has been so sympathetic to the refugees so as to deliberately confuse terms according to an agenda.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

Enter left-wing academics assessing the media. Of course they will complain that the reporting isn't inclusive enough and denounce a focus on borders.

But even so, the second article calls the second phase "ecstatic humanitarianism" which is not too far off. They then disappoint again and call the relative normalisation that followed "fear and securitisation", when all that happened was that the positive spin was no longer as relentless and the media went back to their baseline, presumably because it's difficult to keep up such a level of progressive nonsense for so long.

I'm not going to comment on the first article as it is useless on the face of it. Too few articles over too long a period, tendentious language, and I do not want to know what a discursive psychological approach is.

[Pants-of-dog]

So not only are the journalists not telling the truth, but the academics are also not telling the truth about the journalists.

Sorry, @Kaiserschmarrn. I am not convinced that journalists are deliberately trying to confuse refugees and economic migrants as part of an agenda to bring about a more progressive society.

When we look at the evidence, it seems that media coverage is diverse, with a significant portion of the media coverage showing the refugees and migrants as bad people.

When confronted by this evidence, you then claim that the analyses are tainted with the same bias as the journalists, and seem to argue that the academics are also doing it as part of a vague plan to usher in a more progressive society, even though they (like the journalists) do not personally benefit in any way.

This argument contradicts the existing evidence, assumes impractical motives on the part of the active agents, and requires either an actual conspiracy or minimally having a majority of people in two fields acting in concert according to some vague ideological framework.

[One Degree]

People are good, intelligent, and objective as long as they have a liberal view. Lol

[fokker]

People are good, intelligent, and objective as long as they have a liberal view. Lol

Lol that's true. Surely people know Ana Kasparian from The Young Turks who is a role model for educated, young, liberal women. Then see this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmaXB-NprOM . In the first seconds she shows her true character. They are very intolerant of opposite views.

[One Degree]

Lol that's true. Surely people know Ana Kasparian from The Young Turks who is a role model for educated, young, liberal women. Then see this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmaXB-NprOM . In the first seconds she shows her true character. They are very intolerant of opposite views.

At least she admitted “her political views are who she is”. I am amazed this is true of so many people. This is what makes them intolerant. There is nothing to them except politics. Just superficial human political automatons.

[fokker]

I am not convinced that journalists are deliberately trying to confuse refugees and economic migrants as part of an agenda to bring about a more progressive society.

There are people who believe in that statement but I'm affraid they are not taking part in this discussion.

Sometimes there seems to be an assumption that media are impartial and report the truth. While the core facts will usually be true, story is reported by a person who has certain political beliefs and works for a media company that being under control of a person also implies certain preference of content being reported and language being used. Political beliefs of journalists and their proportion will vary from country to country. There are also cultural differences having influence. Same events can be reported differently, without any group actually having any agenda.

A separate problem exists on the receiving side - people do not question information they receive, simply because they don't have time to really verify it, no credible alternative source for verification or they accept it as truth as they are merely looking to confirm their already existing beliefs. (see Ana Kasparian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIYtubRrMc4, it gets entertaining after 2:28 and applies to all people, not just Trump supporters).

Are The Young Turks impartial? No they are not. They have no hosts with opposing political beliefs. Tomi Lahren tried to speak out about what she really thinks about abortions and she got fired from The Blaze. Brittany Pettibone got banned from the UK for political reasons without actually breaking any laws. Julia Ebner seems to be obsessed with right-wing "extremists" without truly understanding human nature and how extremism is to be avoided and just basically offers the well known "indoctrination" solution.

Hungarian people being a small nation understand that borders are not fixed and state exists only as long as people are willing to protect it. Bigger nations like Germany, France, US tend to be more optimistic as there seems to be lot of free space and budget to help many migrants. Orban is serious about protecting borders of Hungary and people rewarded him for that with another term.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

So not only are the journalists not telling the truth, but the academics are also not telling the truth about the journalists.

The academics probably truly believe we should regard people who migrate across the continent to get to the most lenient and prosperous country as "one of us" and every single European country's press should write stories to that effect, even if these people are just passing through. This is a good example of a progressive sensibility and such stories are exactly what I mean when I refer to stories with progressive context. The same is true for their complaint that there weren't enough emotional stories about individual migrants - as mentioned earlier, there were plenty of these by the public broadcasters in Germany which have a much wider reach and weren't included in their analysis. Also, let's be clear that what they mean by this is sympathetic stories, ideally about the journey from their war-torn home countries to the safe country they would later leave for Europe to emphasise that they are refugees and not economic migrants. Note what they say in the second report you linked about the conflation of migrants and refugees:

In this report, we refer to the significant numbers of people arriving to Europe from conflict-torn areas in 2015-16 as the “refugee/migration crisis”. We use the two concepts together, as they have become widely and interchangeably adopted by the media and policy makers to refer to the recent arrivals of almost a million people in Europe. At the same time, we remain aware that the conflation of terms (“migrant” and “refugee”) carries profound and dangerous consequences for the quality of press coverage.

I hope it's clear that they mean calling them migrants "carries profound and dangerous consequences" and the authors have thus established their progressive credentials. That's, again, exactly my point, so thanks for this.

Further, their criticism that the press has "framed" (their word) the events as a crisis is patently ridiculous - it was a crisis by any objective measure and hence ought to be reported as one. They also explain:

The hypothesis driving the analysis is that narratives of the coverage are contained within an axis that has militarization (control of borders and security of Europe or the nation) on one extreme and humanitarianism (compassion and care of new arrivals) on the other.

Compassion and care as one extreme and militarisation as the other. Yeah, there's no progressive bias here at all.

Of course, they are also oblivious to or gloss over issues such as the fact that Eastern Germany was portrayed as "Dunkeldeutschland" (literally Dark Germany) and any opposition was portrayed negatively, at the mild end as a lack of compassion right up to references to Nazis and fascists (including the Austrian left-wing chancellor at the time invoking the Nazis with respect to Orban). But I suspect, given their disposition, they would be more inclined to agree with these portrayals anyway.

I'm done with this "analysis" by the media and communications department of the LSE (as if I needed to know anything apart from this bit of information from the first page).

Sorry, @Kaiserschmarrn. I am not convinced that journalists are deliberately trying to confuse refugees and economic migrants as part of an agenda to bring about a more progressive society.

Please see above: calling people migrants carries profound and dangerous consequences for the quality of press coverage.

When we look at the evidence, it seems that media coverage is diverse, with a significant portion of the media coverage showing the refugees and migrants as bad people.

When confronted by this evidence, you then claim that the analyses are tainted with the same bias as the journalists, and seem to argue that the academics are also doing it as part of a vague plan to usher in a more progressive society, even though they (like the journalists) do not personally benefit in any way.

This argument contradicts the existing evidence, assumes impractical motives on the part of the active agents, and requires either an actual conspiracy or minimally having a majority of people in two fields acting in concert according to some vague ideological framework.

No conspiracy is required and acting in concert comes about through the similarity in mindset, especially but not only the fear of "exploitation" by the right who, as I have already pointed out, are also usually assumed to "act in concert" on matters such as this. Objectivity and dispassionate reporting are, to progressives, problematic if not dangerous, e.g. the fact that the migrants were in fact intruders, as they crossed borders without permission, at least up until Merkel declared "refugees welcome" to the world, but even later they often ignored directions of border guards to wait and be processed as happened at the Austrian border. Concerns about borders and security is right at the centre of society as far as the general population is concerned. It should be the default and considered normal that these issues get due attention rather than juxtaposing them with compassion and regarding them as negative and an extreme.

Hence in 2015 and 2016, the vast majority of reporting ranged from normal to "ecstatic humanitarianism" which progressives academics interpret as from very bad to very good. The German media engaged in a little bit of introspection in 2016 with respect to their humanitarian ecstasy, probably told themselves, as they always do, that it's okay because they meant well and fell back to their baseline which is somewhere in between.

[Pants-of-dog]

@Kaiserschmarrn

No, I do not see this bias that is apparently obvious to you. You may think that media is portraying migrants a certain way but the evidence contradicts your opinion.

Much the same way that you see a bias in academia, but the bias is actually yours.

And much the same way that you imagine two whole separate fields of people acting in concert based on some vague shared ideology.

Your misunderstandings of the evidence do not constitute evidence for your arguments. You have no evidence, and the evidence that does exist does not support your argumemt.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

@Pants-of-dog, you are making a lot of vague and general assertions. I'll put that down to you not having a rebuttal until you actually address my points.

[Pants-of-dog]

There is not much to say.

You think journalists are deliberately trying to confuse things to make everyone love refugees. The evidence disagrees with you.

Your only rebuttal is to claim that the academics are in on it with the journalists. There is no evidence for this, just your bias about academics and journalists.

You still have not explained why either group would do this, except to assume that they are just so full of progressive ideology so as to do all these things, even though it is a great effort but has no reward.

You also seem to have misunderstood some of the text you quoted.

And you accuse progressives of a whole bunch of off topic things.

We looked at the evidence. You were wrong.

[Ter]

Crossing Divides: The benefits of having friends who aren't 'just like us'

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43784802

A good example.
When all else fails, use children.

[Albert]

Using children for propaganda has been long standing practice by progressives.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

There is not much to say.

Yes, it seems you don't have much to say other than telling me that I'm wrong. That's not exactly what I would call debate.

You are usually among the first to point to bias and be dismissive when presented with evidence that you consider to come from a right-wing source. We know that academics overwhelmingly identify as lefties or progressives in the soft sciences, so much of what I said earlier in this thread is by no means outlandish or very dissimilar from how you or progressives in general respond to evidence, although I at least went to the trouble of explicitly pointing to some of their more blatant biases in selecting criteria and a framework in which to analyse the media.

As I have earlier acknowledged to Rugoz, journalists are constrained by the preferences of their readers. However, academics have few such constraints which is why they criticise the media from a position that is even more polluted by progressivism.

[Pants-of-dog]

Yes, it seems you don't have much to say other than telling me that I'm wrong. That's not exactly what I would call debate.

You are usually among the first to point to bias and be dismissive when presented with evidence that you consider to come from a right-wing source. We know that academics overwhelmingly identify as lefties or progressives in the soft sciences, so much of what I said earlier in this thread is by no means outlandish or very dissimilar from how you or progressives in general respond to evidence, although I at least went to the trouble of explicitly pointing to some of their more blatant biases in selecting criteria and a framework in which to analyse the media.

As I have earlier acknowledged to Rugoz, journalists are constrained by the preferences of their readers. However, academics have few such constraints which is why they criticise the media from a position that is even more polluted by progressivism.

Yes, I am very aware of your biases with respect to academics and media.

Your biases are not an argument, nor are they a reason to dismiss evidence that contradicts your claims.