The Good, the Bad and the Balanced: A critical analysis of the representation of the black African migrants in the South African Daily News and Daily Sun newspapers, 2016-2017

Migration is a human practice that has connected different civilizations across the world. However, some of its modern manifestations can threaten peace and security. For those outside migration’s immediate reach, the news media is an important source for public understanding of its flows and consequences. The existing body of research on media representation of African migrants suggests that the media focus on the negative stories.  Previous studies of Mawadza (2012) and Pineteh (2017) have not dealt with how online press portrays black African migrants in South Africa. This study examines the close and dynamic relationship between the contemporary media and migration. The study examines how black African migrants are represented in two of the dominant online newspapers in South Africa; Daily News and Daily Sun. Data for this study was collected using content analysis by coding stories into categories and critical discourse analysis was then used to analyse patterns and themes found in the data. A twostep analysis of content and critical discourse analyses was used to examine the representation of black African migrants in these two newspapers. News stories about refugees, immigrants, foreigners and asylum seekers were selected for analysis across 40 news articles, analysing the linguistic character of newspaper content pertaining to black African migrants during the period 2016–2017. Themes such as job stealers, illegal, undocumented, drug lords and criminals were found to be popular in the news stories. Analysis showed that the media has improved and moved away from using demeaning words when covering African migrants in SA. Overall, this study strengthens the idea that the media is still hostile towards African migrants however; positive portrayal of African migrants is noticeable in the press.