War of the Words: Dialectics and discourse on the " migrant crisis " and " Islamic terrorists " in British and Italian newspapers

War of the Words: Dialectics and discourse on the " migrant crisis " and " Islamic terrorists " in British and Italian newspapers Denise A Filmer According to political philosopher, Thomas Nail, “The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant” (2015, 1). In 2015 alone over one million human beings, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, risked their lives in unseaworthy vessels to reach the shores of Europe.1 An unparalleled humanitarian phenomenon in terms of scale - migration itself is part of the human condition (cf. Jayawardena, 1995: vii; Nyers, 2013) – the so-called “migrant crisis” has fuelled extreme xenophobic tendencies in popular political discourse throughout the European continent, reflected in equally inflammatory media coverage. Many British newspapers, for instance, have been roundly condemned by global humanitarian agencies, particularly for “the language used”2 to narrate events ensuing from the migratory flow. Italian newspapers have also come under criticism from national human rights organisations, while journalists from both countries have been sued for the lexical choices employed to denote migrants.3 A selected sample of these discursive representations produced by British and Italian news media constructed through the language of conflict are the focus of this contribution. Two mini-case studies analyse small but significant datasets around two key texts that generated meta-linguistic debate in media discourse chains (Fairclough, 1995). The study is divided into two parts. The first offers the theoretical rationale for the qualitative critical approaches adopted and explains the methods used. The second part focuses on the analysis. Considering news as narrative (Baker, 2006; Lopocaro, 2006), the contribution analyses the following discursive events that took place in 2015. The first occurred in the midst of the “Calais Crisis”, as The Sun stirred heated debate with the editorial “migrants are like cockroaches” (Hopkins 17 April 2015). The second was the consequence of the Paris bombings; the then editor of the Italian newspaper Libero (Belpietro 14 November 2015), published a front page editorial under the headline “Bastardi Islamici”, generating discussions as to the legality and ethics of such a title. The contribution concludes with some tentative indications of audience response via readers’ below the line comments to these particularly provocative news texts and a reflection on the status quo of racism in the news after nearly thirty-five years of CDA.