ABSTRACT
The unprecedented movement of refugees and migrants into and across Europe has been a defining social, political, and media event of the 2010s. The repercussions are likely to last for generations and well beyond Europe, on such central issues as security, national identity, human rights, and the very structure of liberal democracies. What has the role of the news media been in telling this story at a time of deepening crisis for journalism? The question is urgent, given that migration and its real and assumed effects drove electoral politics in the 2010s, and professional journalism stood alone among rising tides of social media-fueled rumor mills. This chapter reviews what made the 2015 “refugee crisis” so transformative, situating the conceptual contributions of the volume in the fields of mass communication, comparative politics, and migration studies. It traces this book's exploration, through original research and explanatory analysis of journalistic practices informing news reporting, of the two central problematics – borders and integration – in Greece, where most refugees entered, and Germany/Austria, where they settled.
