Forced Migration and Sport in the Mass Media
The tabloid newspaper <em>Bild</em> portrayed the rising of Bakery Jatta as a professional football player with sometimes fan-alike attitudes. The word ‘fairy tale’ was widely used for describing the sport career of this young Gambian, who migrated in 2015 to Europe in the contest of the ‘refugee crisis’ and could rapidly assert himself in one of the world top football league. Just some years later, the same newspaper started and pushed a media campaign picturing him as an impostor.
This project examines the discourse on<em> ‘refugee crisis’ and sport</em> in the German press coverage. To this end, using the database FACTIVA a catalogue of 1840 pertinent articles was created. They all came out between 2013 and 2018 in the four most sold German newspapers (<em>Bild, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt</em> and <em>Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)</em>. While the distribution and topics of the articles delivers information on how the media covered this topic, the critical discourse analysis of the material lays at the core of this project (Tannen et al., 2015). It aims at exposing and explaining how dominance is reproduced and legitimated in this material. The catalogue is embedded in multiple discourses on the ‘refugee crisis’ (Eberl et al., 2018) and on the integrative power of sport (Smith et al., 2018). In this perspective, the conformity to and resistance against these mainstream discourses mirror ongoing processes of challenge and reproduction of cultural hegemony. Beside considering the catalogue as a whole (Michelini, 2020-In preparation-b), this project focuses on specific topics and in particular on refugee elite athletes (Michelini, 2020-Accepted-a; Michelini & Seiberth, 2020-In preparation).
