Framing the Polish-Belarusian Border in 2021. The Case of Public Service Television (TVP)

ABSTRACT

The 2021 events at the Belarus–European Union border have had considerable political, economic, and humanitarian consequences. Combining insights from the Discourse-Historical Approach and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis with securitization theory, the paper investigates the dominant frames identified in the coverage of the border events by the largest Polish television network (TVP). The findings suggest that TVP portrayed immigrants and refugees mostly as dangerous, relying on the stereotypical image of the Muslim Other. Utilizing quantitative methods to analyze large data samples, the study illustrates how corpus linguistics tools provide valuable insights for social science research.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers and the editorial board for their useful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The end of 2023 marked considerable changes as regards TVP. The coalition led by Civic Platform, having secured the majority in the Polish parliament on December 11, 2023, proceeded with radical measures. On December 19, 2023, the parliament passed a resolution calling for the “restoration of public media impartiality and integrity”. Later the same day, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, Minister of Culture and National Heritage, dismissed the authorities of public media. This led to the cancellation of Wiadomości, which was subsequently replaced by a new daily bulletin 19.30.

2. Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS).

3. The discussed event has often been described as a “crisis”. In line with Krzyżanowska and Krzyżanowski’s (2018, 612–613) observations, the term itself is hardly neutral as the notion of crisis is unspecified as it can be used to legitimize certain policies of the state which needs to control the “crisis”. Therefore, the author opted for more neutral “situation” and “events”, unless a specific discourse was analyzed.

4. In DHA, topoi are conceptualized as argumentative schemata, the content-related warrants or “conclusion rules” that connect the argument or arguments with the conclusion, the claim (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, 75). The DHA understanding of topoi is grounded in the Aristotelean tradition. Their analysis is useful in a thorough investigation of representations of the “Other” as it provides ample information about one’s accepted stereotypes (Boukala 2016, 250).

5. For example, having analyzed two main Spanish newspapers, Alcaraz-Mármol and Soto Almela (2016, 159–160) concluded that most words in close proximity to “immigration” (inmigración) and “immigrant” (inmigrante) had an unfavorable meaning (e.g., “against”, “illegal”, or “problem” – contra, ilegal, problema).

6. The analysis involved all forms of the discussed words. Since Polish is an inflected language, which means it has a complex system of declension and conjugation, it has considerably more forms of nouns, verbs, or adjectives than English.

7. Terrorysta, agresywny, islamski, nielegalny, zamach, terrorysta, nielegalnie, uchodźca, przemytnik, kamień, przemyt, agresor, Irak, Afryka, Syria, forsować, szturm, atakować, fala, przekraczać, presja, Francja, Szwecja, Nicea, ciężarówka.

8. Other European cities where such atrocities were reported in Wiadomości were Brussels and Berlin, though it is worth noting that they also appeared in contexts that did not touch upon migrants or refugees (the cities served as metonyms for the European Union and Germany, respectively).

9. Rosja, Putin, Łukaszenka, dyktator, prowokacja, reżim, hybrydowy, wojna, Mińsk, Moskwa, Kreml, dezinformacja, kłamstwo, propaganda, destabilizacja, prowokacja, Nord Stream.

10. In Polish, two forms of this surname are used interchangeably: Łukaszenko and Łukaszenka. The former is transliterated in accordance with the Russian transliteration rules (“Lukashenko”), whereas the latter subscribes to the Belarusian ones (“Lukashenka”).

11. It is worth mentioning that the remaining instances of the use of the word “provocation” concerned Russian actions aimed at Ukraine.

12. Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, rząd, mur, zapora, ogrodzenie, szczelny, stan wyjątkowy, napięcie, zasieki, służby, straż, bronić, obrona, strzec, sprzęt, szkolenie, WOT (Wojska Obrony Terytorialnej).

13. The term refers to the numerous battles that the Kingdom of Poland (and, subsequently, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) fought against the Tatar and Ottoman Empire during the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period of modern history. The status of the then Polish state as a defender of Christian Europe would be recognized by numerous popes and leaders of the then Europe (Knoll 1974). Also, during the partition period, the term would be used by multiple leading Polish authors and humanists to preserve the national identity of the Poles (Tazbir 2017).

14. Though it is worth noting that the Messianic nationalistic discourse which portrays a nation as a savior of Europe is not restricted to Poland. In fact, it has been identified in the discourse of various social actors in numerous post-communist countries (for a broader discussion, see Graff and Korolczuk 2022, 106–109).

15. Regarding Afghanistan, the discursive construal of Afghans was relatively less straightforward. The people who left the country after the Taliban had seized power were not presented negatively, whereas those of Afghan nationality who were spotted at the border would be presented as “having nothing in common with the refugees from Afghanistan” or “illegal migrants”.