Framing the Iraqi Refugee Crisis

Using headlines in digital media may strongly affect readers’ socio-political cognition (Abdel-Raheem & Alkhammash, 2022). That is, departing from Van Dijk’s claim (1988), constructing headlines in media is not always viewed as a syntax issue but rather a knowledge problem. To this end, a purposive sampling of news headlines was then applied to construct the macro portrayal of Iraqis in The Guardian and Deutsche Welle, followed by a critical discourse and framing analysis using Van Dijk's (2008,2009) socio-cognitive approach and Entman’s (1991,1993) framing theory. The study arrives at the following results: Firstly, the news headlines are viewed as performing a political and empathic discourse function in The Guardian. Secondly, the results reveal that the contrastive portrayal of discourse in Deutsche Welle is the effect of the political events in Germany. The most remarkable finding to emerge from this paper is that the Iraqi refugee crisis is defined as a social problem in the Middle East where the focus is on ethnic-religious minorities, such as Yazidis and Christians. Besides, The Guardian and Deutsche Walle reinforce the idea that Iraqi refugees have experienced forced displacement, brutal attack, exodus, and demographic relocation in Iraq, where ISIS is the main factor behind the crisis.