Spazi mediali delle migrazioni. Framing e rappresentazioni del confine nell'informazione italiana

Media play a central role in the process of symbolic and social construction of reality; the news trace the outlines of the spaces defining the identities – who is in, the belonging, who is the other, as well as the explanatory dimensions and the attributions of responsibility that prelude the formation of public policies – what happens and what should be done. In the decades-long experience of Italy and other advanced countries, this role is particularly evident in the representation of migratory phenomena. Many researches, over the years, have investigated the ability or (more often) the inability of journalism to read the complexity of this phenomenon, providing a panorama drawn by some consolidated frames, a repertoire of recurring images, iconic representations of the foreigner, of the 'evil', of the 'enemy' and of the 'different'. Given the diversification of situations, events, political-institutional frameworks, this landscape maintains consistency in the construction of a discursive space that regenerates national and community membership and legitimate policies of exclusion. Adopting a sociological perspective on communication and media studies, the contribution explores the contours of this cultural horizon through data and case histories from empirical paths and the international literature on the subject. Our conclusion is that there are three prevalent frames – 'security', 'crisis', 'pietistic' – in which iconic, linguistic and metaphorical apparatuses define the most common interpretative keys in the journalistic representation of the migratory phenomenon.