New report examines hostile media coverage of asylum and refugee issues and calls for a more optimistic and progressive discussion
Asylum Aid today published a new report looking back at ten years of hostile media coverage of asylum and refugee issues.
You can read the report - 'Dividing Lines: Asylum, the media and some reasons for (cautious) optimism'- here.
The report argues that while media coverage of immigration still remains extremely tough, things have changed in subtle but important ways. There are still "terrible asylum stories", but fewer now than ten years ago.
The turn of the 1990s and 2000s, says the report, saw media and politicians "engaged not so much in a race to the bottom as a crash to the basement," with a sustained and brutal onslaught on asylum seekers.
With the number of hostile stories now falling away, the report calls for a more optimistic and progressive discussion of refugees and asylum rights, and to do so for the large audiences commanded by the mainstream media.
Asylum Aid says it is time to work more closely and cannily with journalists and editors than ever before.
The report concludes that "there has been a great deal of abuse chucked our way in the last decade. Now is not the time for chucking it back, but for moving into a whole new conversation."