Η προσέγγιση της προσφυγικής κρίσης από τις ιστοσελίδες ενημέρωσης στην Ήπειρο

Abstract

In 2015 and thereafter, a great number of refugees and immigrants arrived in Greece. Several hundreds of them crossed the border from Greece to other European countries. At the same time a small number remained in Greece. They were mainly concentrated in the islands of their entry to Greece and from there, a number of them gradually moved to the mainland. In March 2016, Epirus received the first asylum seekers mostly from the following countries: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the refugee crisis was represented and which themes and topics were explored in three popular news websites in Epirus (Ioannina, Arta, Preveza) over a period of 14 months (from 01/01/16  to 31/03/2017). Based on a quantitative content analysis, 319 related articles / posts were examined with the following findings: the largest number of refugee theme articles were detected firstly during the first wave of refugee arrivals (March 2016) and secondly at the emergence of debates surrounding children’s education (September & November 2016).The majority of these texts were case-specific, with no focus on the causes of the refugee crisis, while a small part of them was thematic, focusing on the causes of the refugee crisis and addressing matters concerned as a wider European issue. Themes and topics of these posts were mainly about social solidarity for refugees and hospitality infrastructure. Furthermore a smaller percentage of the texts were about the delinquent behavior of refugees.