A flood of illegal immigrants or a humanitarian crisis provoked by the government – A comparative mixed-methods analysis of framing strategies of Poland's two leading media outlets

Abstract

The present paper aims at reconstructing, analyzing, and explaining the framing of the situation at the Polish-Belarusian border in 2021 and early 2022 by Poland’s two most influential television stations: the state-controlled right-wing TVP and the commercial left-liberal TVN. The main analytical approach used in this study was Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). It is a branch of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) that pays special attention to the sociopolitical contexts, allowing the researcher to go beyond purely linguistic analyses and focus on (both micro and meso) sociological implications. Therefore, the study analyzed the discourses through the lenses of securitization and embedding the findings into a broader discussion about migration in Poland. The paper demonstrates that the coverage of the events by both stations was radically different: the state television largely reproduced the discourse of the then ruling party, whereas the liberal TVN focused on the delegitimization of the then government and the border guard, accusing them of violating international law.