The Representation of Migration in the Hungarian Television News from a Multimodal Perspective

News media can fulfil a wide variety of functions while reporting on events. It may serve for example as an informative medium, an entertaining platform or even as an influencing tool. This variety of functions makes news media capable of serving as a tool in political communication that applies presentation techniques on the verbal and visual modalities. Although these are usually aligned and support each other, the current research focuses on situations when modality dissonance is part of the representation. The current research focuses on the analysis of a technique through which the broadcasted content reaches the audience in distinct modalities with conflicting meanings and, still, the visual and the verbal representations together construct a coherent framing.

The research aim to explore this phenomenon by analysing verbal and visual representations of migration appeared in the Hungarian media. The sample employs a keyword search in politically heightened periods between 2015 and 2023 when the representation of migration played a crucial role in political communication and resulted in political mobilization. The use of the audio-visual materials from the two opposing polarities of the Hungarian media landscape, namely the news shows of a state-run, publicly funded and an independent, commercial television channel, make the parallel use of verbal and visual analytical methods possible. The current study systematically uses a corpus-based multimodal discourse analysis in order to analyse news values from the sample data. Preliminary results show that in the news of the state-run television, migration is not always visually tense or threatening but the verbal representation in the vast majority of cases increases these factors. On the other hand, although in the news of the independent, commercial channel, new value is also high, in this sample instead of the presence of tension and threat, verbal and visual representations of solidarity are communicated dominantly.