Media representation of minors who migrate on their own: The 'MENA' in the Spanish press

 Juan-David Gómez-Quintero, Zaragoza (Spain)

 Jesús-C. Aguerri, Burgos (Spain)

 Chabier Gimeno-Monterde, Zaragoza (Spain)

https://doi.org/10.3916/C66-2021-08

Keywords

Teens, immigrants, press, content analysis, text mining, MENA

Abstract

This article analyses Spanish media treatment of a certain type of immigrant: the unaccompanied foreign minor ('MENA' in Spanish). The media play an important role in creating and disseminating ideas and images amongst the general public, thereby promoting the articulation of sets of meanings called discourses. The main goal of this research is to identify the discursive approaches that have been constructed around the term “MENA” in the main Spanish daily newspapers. To this end, we gathered and analysed all the news reports published between January 2017 and October 2019 by the digital editions of the four most widely-read newspapers in Spain (La Vanguardia, El País, El Mundo and ABC). This analysis was performed using text mining techniques (an important field in data science) such as term frequency, inverse document frequency, and correlation networks between words. Our results show that the term “MENA” evokes a criminalising, moralistic, welfare-dependent discourse that is articulated from an adult-centric, nationalist perspective. The study concluded that the conservative press uses the acronym more frequently than the left-wing media. However, no significant discursive differences were observed between conservative and progressive press in terms of the language used, which often had negative connotations that stigmatised the young people concerned.

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Fundref

R+D Project “Unaccompanied Migrant Minors in Spain. Current situation, care circuit and social and educational intervention model for inclusion”, Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, PGC2018-100944-B-I00; by the GESES Research Group of the Department of Psychology and Sociology of the University of Zaragoza and of the Sociology Department of the University of Burgos.

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Technical information

Received: 30-04-2020

Revised: 24-05-2020

Accepted: 03-07-2020

OnlineFirst: 15-11-2020

Publication date: 01-01-2021

Article revision time: 24 days | Average time revision issue 66: 16 days

Article acceptance time: 64 days | Average time of acceptance issue 66: 51 days

Preprint editing time: 201 days | Average editing time preprint issue 66: 193 days

Article editing time: 246 days | Average editing time issue 66: 238 days

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