This week saw World Refugee Day, designated by the United Nations to honour people who have been forced to flee around the globe. The day was first held globally in 2001 to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, which defines the term 'refugee' and sets international standards for their protection.
On the latter, it's easy to see the ways in which the Government has failed (see: the Rwanda deportation bill). On the former, it is the media that fails, time and time again.
The Convention's definition of a refugee is "someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion".
But this is not the definition used by media outlets, who reserve the term 'refugee' for people whose request for asylum has been approved by a host country.
Instead, the media bandies around terms such as 'migrant', 'asylum seeker', or 'illegal immigrant'. The least used term? People.
"There is no 'illegal migration', because people are forced to flee. They don't choose to come for a better life. They come for safety."
Zahra Shaheer, a prominent Afghan journalist and newsreader, fled to the UK following the Taliban's rise to power in August 2021. She told the latest episode of the Media Storm podcast about the huge gap in empathy in the reporting on those who have been forced out of their homelands.
"A person… lost everything," she said. "And we call it illegal migration? It's not fair."
Indeed, the rampant dehumanisation of refugees in our media has led to desensitisation so extensive that a story about a Greek coastguard deliberately throwing people seeking asylum into the Mediterranean Sea - to their deaths - barely makes a sound. A cow hit by a police car generates more concern.
What is behind this?
A potent cocktail of scapegoating and racism underpins dehumanisation.
"When Russia invaded Ukraine, I didn't remember any mainstream media, or any outlet, even with the tabloid or other, labelling Ukrainians as 'illegal immigrants' or asylum seekers," Osama Gaweesh, a former dentist and political activist who fled Egypt after a military coup in 2013, and is now editor-in-chief of EgyptWatch in the UK, told Media Storm.
He pointed to the word that so often follows 'refugee' or 'migrant' in UK media - 'crisis': "Describing people as a 'crisis' is not fair. We can talk about economic crisis, we can talk about border crisis, we can talk about inflation crisis, but we can't label people as a crisis. I describe this as a racist label."
A humanitarian crisis is typically defined as an event that "critically threatens the health, safety, security or wellbeing of a community". It is telling that, in most cases when our media describes the 'refugee crisis', the crisis it seems to be referring to is not the millions of people being forced out of their homes, but the tens of thousands trying to come to ours.
As Shaheer pointed out, the term 'crisis' should "highlight the need, that refugees need help, they need support". Instead, the creation of the 'crisis' is placed solely on the people trying to cross borders, with responsibility lifted off the creators of the border policies.
This is summed up in Gaweesh's impassioned plea to listeners on this week's Media Storm: "A refugee is not your enemy. Your enemy is the regime that made this refugee. The mainstream media here need to understand this: refugees didn't cause the inflation to increase. Refugees didn't make the NHS salary low. Refugees didn't force Britain to leave the European Union.
The Government here in this country and some political parties, with their pathetic policies and their support and backing of authoritarian leaders in the Middle East, they are the problem."
The mass scapegoating of refugees and the mass gaslighting of the public is to be expected, when there are vastly more negative than posi...