Towards European securitization press processes? A comparison of Sahel news coverage in Southern European countries

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the role of the media in the processes of securitisation of international policies in Mediterranean countries. To do so, it studies the presence of the ‘security’ and ‘human drama’ frames in seven newspapers in Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal, with the primary objective of measuring these frames to answer questions about the differences found in the newspapers of these countries and the issues discussed in them. Our hypothesis is European Mediterranean press suffers from media securitisation when reporting on the Sahel conflicts. The reason is mainly due to the singularisation of migration issues. Machine learning, specifically unsupervised (LDA) and supervised (SVM) algorithms, were used to locate the frames to analyse the large volume of extracted data. This type of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique gives excellent results for political communication research. The results show that the security frame is in most of the media analysed. In short, security as a discursive element is the central narrative when dealing with the socio-political reality of the Sahel countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Framing
• security
• Sahel
• securitization
• Southern European media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).