I rifugiati ucraini nei quotidiani italiani, francesi e inglesi

Differences in the attitude of the public opinion towards migrants and refugees based on their origin and cultural backgrounds have been widely investigated, especially with reference to northern Europe (De Coninck 2020; De Coninck et al., 2019). The study presented in this article aims, on the one hand, to expand the investigation by considering three different areas represented by France, Italy and the United Kingdom; on the other hand, it aims to focus specifically on how mainstream media framed the information about the arrival of refugees from Syria (2014) and Ukraine (2022). The study, therefore, compares six datasets along two different dimensions: the nationality of the media outlets under analysis and the nationality of refugees. A selection of articles taken from widely distributed national and international newspapers were analysed with the aim to foreground implicit subtexts and bias, with ultimate aim of shedding light on the role of mainstream press discourse in influencing the public opinion about refugees. A mixed corpus was collected from online sources, with reference to the first weeks of mass flows from Syria and Ukraine, respectively March-April 2014 and June-July 2022. The articles were analysed with particular attention to the strategies and discursive patterns in the language used by the media to express emotions (Plutchik, 2001), and the implicit and explicit appraisal of people and facts (Martin and White, 2005). Since communication is not limited to verbal texts but is intrinsically multimodal (Kress, 2010), the analysis also involved images, if present, which were analysed according to Kress and Van Leeuwen's (2006) grammar of images.