In 'their' words and in 'our' words. A comparison between European policies, media narratives and migrants’ testimonies of landings in the Mediterranean

The aim of the paper is to highlight convergences and divergences in the narrative patterns used by the Italian press and the migrants, through a comparison between the representations the main national newspapers made of the landings in Lampedusa in 2011, with testimonies and stories directly told by the survivors of the sea crossings in 2014. At the same time, we will use this confrontation as a key to interpret and analyse the recent EU migration policies, in order to understand whether and to what extent their narratives are closer to the media discourse on the migration phenomenon or to the narratives of its protagonists, the migrants. We used a methodological triangulation based on the content and frame analysis of the headlines and their reference to 311 articles about the landings in Lampedusa between February 15th and April 15th 2011. We gathered and analysed the narratives of direct testimonies of migrants landed in Sicily between the summer and autumn 2014. Lastly, we compared the results with the key principles in the European Agenda on Migration, approved in 2015. The results of this comparative analysis allowed us to notice how the European migration policies tend to shift towards the same directives used by the media in displaying the migration phenomenon, distancing themselves from the direct perception its protagonists – the migrants – have of their own experience, despite being the real recipients of such policies