Chapter published in:
Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis
Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 291–316

Chapter 12
Preaching from a distant pulpit

The European migrant crisis seen through a New York Times editorial and reader comments

On 18 September 2015, in the midst of the greatest movement of refugees and migrants that Europe has seen since the Second World War, The New York Times published an editorial entitled “Europe should see refugees as a Boon, not as a Burden.” Not surprisingly, the article received well over 450 comments from readers reflecting the myriad of opinions about the complex issue of (European) migration and refugees. This paper is interested in the discourses about (European) migration that emerge from both the editorial and reader comments. Partially inspired by Text World Theory (Werth 1995), the study attempts to determine readers’ varying opinions about the issue and how this reflects and/or diverges from the view(s) presented by the editorial.
Keywords: 2015 European migrant crisis, Editorials, Critical Discourse Analysis, Text World Theory, New Media, Corpus Linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1CDA and media discourse
    • 2.2New(s) media and the editorial
    • 2.3Text World Theory
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1Editorial analysis
    • 4.2Comment analysis
    • 4.3Comment analysis
  • 5.Discussion and preliminary conclusions
  • References
Published online: 07 March 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.13boy
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