Visual Representations of Refugees in German Media 2010 - 2020
By: Cassidy Chreene Whittle, M.S. GMC - German
Advisors: Dr. Britta Kallin, Associate Professor of German, and
Dr. Richard Utz, Chair and Professor, Literature, Media, and Communication
The News Organizations
In selecting the news organizations for this research, it was important to me to find higher-quality, widespread media reporting to illustrate how these images are dispensed to large numbers of educated people and not simply to look at the known sensationalized lower-standard media. Additionally, I sought news organizations with varied political bias in order to demonstrate that the misuse of images in relation to refugees is not limited to one political ideology. Using the below graphic from ScienceBlogs.de, I selected Der Spiegel as a left-leaning, analytical magazine headquartered in the north of Germany in the city of Hamburg, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a right-sided analytical newspaper from the southern German city Frankfurt, and lastly die tageszeitung (taz.de) as a mid-level quality, leftist newspaper from Berlin. Each news source is detailed further below.
Image: Scienceblogs.de
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Der Spiegel is a weekly center-left news publication founded in 1946 headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. Its circulation at the beginning of 2020 was nearly 700,000 and it is regarded as one of Germany's leading news publications.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) is a daily newspaper founded in 1949 in Frankfurt and is regarded as a center-right, liberal conservative publication (Koopmans, Deuse).
Image: Wikimedia Commons
The third and final news source included in this research is die tagezeitung, or as it’s more commonly known, taz.de, a left-leaning cooperative-owned newspaper founded in Berlin in 1978.