Portuguese News Coverage of Migrants during COVID-19

The next speaker in this afternoon session at IAMCR 2023 is Ester Minga, with a focus on the intertwined crises of migration and COVID-19 in Portugal. Portugal does not receive as many asylum requests as larger European countries, but has been very proactive in taking in its share of migrants since the major refugee crisis in 2015; this is a continuation of Portuguese Luso-Tropicalism.

The present study explored attitudes towards migration in Portugal by examining articles from a number of key newspapers in the country and analysing the news frames they used, especially in the context of COVID-19 outbreaks in migrant accommodation – and Ester now runs us through a considerable number of sample articles from this collection. Migrants were at times framed as a health risk; at times as a human rights obligation. (Sorry, there was probably more here but there wasn’t really any meaningful summary of the anecdotal review of the media content.)