The non-human interest story: De-personalising the migrant

Abstract

We argue that newspapers deliberately employ techniques to dehumanise and depersonalise news stories in order to cultivate distance between the reader and human subject in newspaper accounts. We posit this as a dominant technique in discourses of immigration in newspaper discourses. In the process the migrant is narrated as the sub-human entrapped through socio-legal terminologies and deviance discourses that both silence and trivialise human suffering. We highlight the case study of the refugee settlement in Calais dubbed the ‘jungle’ to illuminate this phenomenon. We argue that the depersonalisation of immigration stories is a sustained technique in media to submerge the ethical and humanitarian paradigms presented by immigration.