COMPARING THE COVERAGE OF REFUGEE ISSUES BY THE TORONTO STAR AND THE NEW YORK TIMES

Introduction In today’s world, the word refugees elicit different opinions when mentioned. It has become a significant issue due to conflicts that are being witnessed in different parts of the World, perhaps the mostly referred to are the Syrian refugees. Therefore, the media has taken an active role in shaping the opinions of citizens as most people rely on the media to get the information. Hence this paper will examine how the mainstream print media covers the refugee issues. The investigator will use The Toronto Star and the New York Times to compare their coverage. How frequently do the mainstream print media in America run stories on Refugee issues? 3. What are the main aspects of refugees covered by the mainstream print media? 4.

What agenda does the mainstream print media in America set on Refugees? Scope and Research problem The study will focus on all refugees’ stories that were published on the two mainstream print media platforms namely The Toronto Star and The New York Times by sampling stories that have been released between 1st January 2015 to 31st December 2017. This period had witnessed events that have led to the increase of refugees in different parts of the world. For example, it is at this time that Russia entered the Syrian conflict and also the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar have continuously been victimized making them refugees. This data will be fed by the researcher into the coding sheets with scores allocated for presence or absence of an attribute (Ojo, 350).

Literature review Research has shown that the media plays a significant role in shaping the opinion of the public. Therefore, more research is done today to determine to which extent it affects developing the mindsets of subscribers. The increased research has led to cross-examination of prints media which has been aided by the advancement of the technology. The framing of print media has accelerated development of perceptions (Ojo, 357). Therefore, these mainstream print media comparisons can be used to hypothesis the tendencies on of commercializing news and deliberately emphasizing on some news. Also, some scholars have investigated by comparisons of different media on how the level of democracies affects the reporting on refugee issues (Danner,72). The discussion on the mainstream print media on refugees’ matters had not been well researched even with the significance that it holds to the global community.