While the rhetorical conflicts have been ongoing, they have been crystallized by journalistic outlets making style guide decisions as to appropriate terms. In Europe, it was Al-Jazeera’s decision (2015) to refer to those fleeing Syria as refugees and not migrants and in the U.S. it was the Associated Press’ decision (2013) to discard illegal in favor of undocumented.
By analyzing the response of political actors, parties and interest groups, as well as the broader policy communities, this paper will seek to explain why these conflicts arose when they did and what they say about contrasting public discourses both within Europe and between Europe and the United States.
The data will be taken from the MIT-based Media Cloud, which has extensive coverage of newspaper, party and NGO data in the U.S. and Europe. The European coverage, which draws on Europe Media Monitor project, has well over 125 sources for all the countries I wish to cover. The platform is designed to reverse-engineering major news stories to visualize how ideas spread, how media frames change over time, and whose voices dominate a discussion” and thus most appropriate for this project.
