"Lithuanian migrants send crime rocketing": representation of "new" migrants in regional print media

ENOver the last two decades, a considerable amount of research has been conducted on the representation of migrants and minorities in the mass media, starting with van Dijk’s (1988a, 1988b, 1991) seminal work on racism in the news media and with the ‘Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press, 1996–2006’ project at Lancaster University, one of the most recent large-scale studies focusing on the United Kingdom (Baker et al., 2007, 2008). However, the majority of studies have focused on national or international news media, with little attention being paid to regional, let alone local media – though the work of Richardson and Franklin (2003, 2004) is an exception. This commentary analyses the discursive representation of migrants from Eastern Europe in regional print media in Cambridgeshire, England, and focuses in particular on, first, the most salient themes used in the portrayal of migrants, and, second, how the paper constructs itself as a local publication with strong concerns for its readership. A small corpus, consisting of 68 articles published between July 2006 and August 2008, was collected from the Cambridge Evening News, a regional daily newspaper published by Cambridge Newspapers Limited with a circulation of 24,077 (Newspaper Society, 2008). As a regional newspaper, the Cambridge Evening News covers regional and local news, with occasional reference to national and global issues – if they affect or are linked to local interests. The analytic framework used in this study is located in the tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), supported by quantitative evidence obtained through corpus analysis methods.