Look Who’s Coming to Europe: Detecting Threatening and Humanitarian Undertones in the Visual Coverage of the 2015 Refugee Crisis in the British and French Online Mainstream Media

The media bring the world to our fingertips, and in 2015 media reports helped citizens across the world live the massive exodus of Middle East and African refugees. Images are processed much quicker than words, making them an element that both casual and in-depth online readers are exposed to. Simple exposure to images has been shown to activate emotions and stereotypes. This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the visual representation of the refugees’ arrival in Europe at the peak of the crisis, in August and September 2015. We examine over 1000 pictures that appeared on the bbc.com, lefigaro.fr and lemode.fr through human and automatic image coding. By tracking the characteristics of those most prominently featured in images (their age, gender and visible cultural markers), their gestures and posture, and their interactions we measure the extent to which the depiction of their arrival is portrayed as a threat or as a humanitarian crisis. We find significant differences across countries, and significant differences between the left- and right-leaning online media in France. This paper sets light on a previously unexplored aspect of the information environment that the UK and French public was exposed to as the refugee crisis was unfolding, as well as illustrate the insights that can be gained from a quantitative visual coverage analysis.