ABSTRACT
Reflecting findings from a comparative study of European newsrooms, we examine where the practices of depicting “the refugee crisis” and in particular how it is visualized are considered through moral and ethical lenses. In the autumn of 2015, there was a considerable increase in the number of people seeking refugee status in Europe. The media coverage of immigrants and asylum seekers has been thoroughly examined by several studies. Two news frames have been identified as particularly important: refugees as victims, and refugees as threat. With respect to news sources, both newspapers relied mainly on politicians and governmental institutions as sources of information to report on refugees. In general, the use of images played an important role in the reporting of the international refugee crisis. The debate on how the media should represent suffering and especially the suffering of the distant other is controversial.
