Neighboring Countries' Press Coverage of the Syrian Refugee Crisis: An Analytical Study of Lebanese "Ya-Sour", Jordanian "Al-Wakeel News" and Turkish "Turk Press"

Abstract

Local and international media, in their various traditional and digital forms, have shed considerable light on the Syrian refugee crisis caused by the war that has engulfed their country since 2011. The nature and objectives of press coverage varied from one media to another, and from country to country, some of which were linked to political agendas (Zaaroor, 2018, Maharat Foundation, 2016), and others were linked to emotional and humanitarian factors (Alhayek, 2014). Syrian refugees were portrayed in different media settings (Ramasubramanian et al., 2018). The image of refugees in the Western press also differed from country to another (Berry et al., 2015, Efe, 2019). This crisis continues and so is the press coverage with considerable variation in attitudes and trends.This study aims to analyze how the most prominent news websites in neighboring countries i.e. Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey have covered the Syrian refugee crisis, by showing the interest of the Lebanese "Ya-sour", Jordanian "Al-Wakeel News" and Turkish "Turk Press" websites in the issues of the refugees, their complications, the highlighted aspects, and the position of these sites on the Syrian refugee crisis through the topics they focused on and the issues they prioritized.The study showed that the most important topics discussed were "security", "economy" and "politics" and the main focus was on "refugee impact on commodity prices", "difficult living conditions for refugees" and "refugee impact on the labour market". As for persuasion methods, it has been found that the "provocative" and "violent" methods were the most used in the examined press coverage.

Keywords: Syrian Refugees, News Websites, Media discourse, Content analysis

DOI: 10.7176/NMMC/80-05

Publication date:May 31^st 2019