Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Role Of The Media In The Automatic Dehumanization Of Refugees, Stelian Medianu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The media plays an important role in the process of shaping attitudes about controversial issues such as the arrival of refugees to Canada. The first aim of this research was to investigate how the Canadian newsprint media portrayed one noteworthy event involving the arrival of refugees to Canada: the arrival of the Tamil refugee boat to British Columbia in August of 2010. A media content analysis revealed that the overall portrayal of refugees in the Canadian press in response to this event was mixed. On the one hand, refugees were perceived either as bogus claimants or as criminals/terrorists. On the …