Multimodal Discursivity: Framing European Union Borders in Live-Blogs

Abstract

More than one million refugees fleeing war-torn areas reached Europe in 2015, making migrant (im)mobility and border dynamics breaking news in media reports. In this context, traditional news media’s adoption of live-blogs was particularly significant in the coverage. This new online news format offered frequently updated coverage and reader interactivity as events unfolded and through multiple modalities of communication, including text, photos, videos, social media posts, maps, graphics, hyperlinks, computer-generated visualizations, and readers’ comments. This study employs critical multimodal discourse analysis to examine the framing of the European Union borders in live-blogs produced for four European news outlets online. It discusses the three main frames that emerged from analysis—border management, borders as lived spaces, and borders as politically constructed spaces—and their implications for the construction of discourse on migration.