The 'Good' Romanians versus the 'Bad' Romanians: Values, Perceptions and Stereotypes in British and Romanian Media Coverage of the Romanian Immigration into the United Kingdom

Following the end of transitional employment restrictions on January 1, 2014 for Romanians and Bulgarians into UK, there has been a significant surge of the British public interest into Romanian and Bulgarian immigration. This interest was echoed by extensive media coverage of this subject by the British mainstream press, but most vocally by the tabloids. The paper mainly explores the media techniques used by the British press when portraying the new immigrants into UK, from the biased use of statistics to applying an ideological mindset that justifies the treatment of immigrants as scapegoats. The research is bringing into focus a content-based analysis, but also includes an analysis of the visual elements supporting the materials published by the press. Moreover, the research shows how this process of “stigmatization” fuelled a renewed interest in the question of UK’s EU membership, both at the level of mainstream press and of the political milieu, and how the immigration debate in fact challenged the idea that UK should be a part of the European Union. By deconstructing the stereotypes involved in describing the Romanian immigrants, the paper will thus propose a detailed portrayal of newcomers, as reflected in the British press, and a glossary of words linking migration flows into United Kingdom with discrimination in the last five years. While analyzing the discourse used by British press, and especially by the British tabloids, the research will also focus on the counter reaction of the Romanian authorities and community in the same British media outlets, and the attempts to offer an alternative portrayal of the Romanian immigrant, with a positive economic impact on Britain. More over, the research shows, this counter narrative in the British press was supported by a prompt portrayal of the British tabloids in the Romanian press of the time as “populist” - a term devoted in Romania mainly when describing the behavior of political parties. Thus, the immigration debate, the paper argues, extended the usage of the term “populist” in mainstream Romanian media to describing a whole new actor – the British press - with a term reserved for political actors. The paper is thus drawing a complex puzzle around the portrayal of Romanian immigrants in UK, bringing together multiple perspectives, in order to show how these different descriptions fueled the immigration debate and how this, in turn, influenced the media and political discourse on the fundamental question of the values that keep United Kingdom into European Union.