The (golden) Dawn of Audiences? Testing the Audience Empowerment Thesis through a Framing Analysis of Immigration in Crisis-stricken Greece

The participatory web creates countless opportunities for citizen participation in the public debate. More and more news organizations jump in the web 2.0 wagon, opening up venues for citizen expression and involvement in news production. One significant aspect of this trend is User-Generated Content in online media, often in the form of reader-produced comments to articles, which can signify a power shift in favor of audiences and enable them to transform from silent readers to vocal “produsers. At the same time, the financial crisis has led to strengthening of anti-immigrant stances. In Greece, a side effect has been the shocking rise of the Golden Dawn, an extreme right-wing and neo-nazi party, from total obscurity to the third most popular party in the 2012 elections, based solely on a stern anti-immigrant and nationalist agenda and the overt promotion of hate speech and violence against immigrants. The aim of this study is to test the ‘empowerment thesis’ regarding audience participation in the media, exploring whether, and how, audiences’ discourses in established media websites reinforce, challenge or broaden mainstream discourses about immigration. The study employs systematic framing analysis of 177 journalistic articles about immigration published in the most popular Greek online media from October 2010 to February 2011, to identify the predominant frames used by journalists to define the ‘immigration problem’. Next, these frames are compared to the frames produced by readers in 1112 comments. Observed differences are explained with regard to the characteristics of the journalistic texts that trigger audience responses, the political orientation and the media philosophy of news outlets. The findings shed light on whether participatory journalism in mainstream media represents a real power shift from traditional gatekeepers towards audiences. Also, they allow a better understanding of how the “out-of-nowhere” anti-immigrant discourses were built and the role of media therein.