The Great Divide: Polish and German migrants treated very differently in British press

The UK media represents Polish migrants in a more negative light compared to how it treats German migrants – according to a new study, which sets out recommendations for editors and journalists on how to improve balance in their coverage.

Research from the University of Birmingham has been published in a report titled Representing Central and East European migrants in the media - history and stereotypes.

The study looked at a sample of online news articles from four major British newspapers; guardian.co.uk, telegraph.co.uk, mailonline.co.uk, and express.co.uk, from 2014-2019. The researchers found that there was a marked difference in the way that Polish and German people living in the UK were represented in the news stories.

Dr Charlotte Galpin, Associate Professor in German and European Politics, who led the research said: “Polish and German migrants are two of the largest groups of EU-born residents in the UK, with the countries typically seen as belonging to two hugely different parts of Europe, despite their interconnected histories. Our research shows that media representations of Polish and German migrants use stereotypes that reproduce historical ideas of ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Europe structured by economic and cultural hierarchies.”

The researchers found that Polish migrants tend to be grouped together with other Central and Eastern European (CEE) migrants and are primarily portrayed as low-skilled, manual workers. This is particularly the case in the right-wing tabloid press. For example, the headline of a Daily Mail article ‘Will your nanny, cleaner or builder have to leave the UK?’ presents manual jobs as typical of (Eastern) European workers in Britain, while the framing as ‘your’ worker implies British ownership over CEE migrants.

Coverage of Polish people in the UK also portrayed them as taking advantage of the UK welfare state. For example, the Express reported that EU workers, mostly those from Poland, were sending child benefits back to their families, meaning that ‘British taxpayers are spending millions to raise children in foreign countries.’ These stories are printed despite Government data that shows a net contribution to the UK economy.

German migrants, however, do not appear in a significant way in media narratives except in the period immediately surrounding the 2016 Brexit referendum. Here, Germans feature in more positive articles about the EU citizens in the UK who face a loss of status after Brexit. In these articles, Germans are characterised as working in highly skilled professions such as financial services, medicine, higher education, and management, meaning that they are characterised as wealthy, middle-class and highly educated and an overall benefit to the UK economy.

Dr Maren Rohe, who co-authored the research, added: “We also found that there was a tendency to racialise Polish people and not Germans in the British media, treating Polish people as an ethnic minority. Tabloids describe Polish communities in British towns as ‘Little Poland’ or characterise Poles as struggling to integrate or speaking poor English.

“In contrast, German migrants are implicitly imagined as white and fully integrated. The only negative story of a German migrant in the UK appears in tabloid articles reporting the case of an ‘incompetent’ NHS doctor who caused the death of a patient when he injected the wrong medicine. But he is described as a ‘Nigerian-born German citizen’ which racialises him and leads the reader to infer that he is not ‘really’ German.”

In interviews with the researchers, Polish and German people living in the UK said that they are aware of the negative stereotypes about migrants being promoted by the UK press and that this affects their sense of belonging in the UK, their engagement with politics, and in some cases led to them experiencing hate crimes.

The report outlines steps that journalists, editors and media regulators can take to improve the fairness of representation of eastern and western European migrants in the British press, such as avoiding the use of common tropes that categorise migrants into hierarchies, using precise terms relevant for the story about geography and history, and amending Clause 12 of the IPSO Editors’ Code of Practice to cover discriminatory remarks towards minority groups, following recommendations by charities such as the Media Diversity Institute.

Dr Galpin concluded: “Our research shows that there is an unfairness in the way migrants from different parts of the world are represented in the UK media. This can have real-world political and even violent consequences, leading to hate crimes targeting specific groups. Those in the media have a responsibility and an expectation from the British public that they will report on stories accurately and fairly, and this should not be contingent on where a subject was born. It is important that the media understands the power they have and takes these recommendations on board to better represent the world we live in, and the people that live in it.”