A Poliheuristic Reading of Securitization Theory: A Study of Media’s Role in Shaping the Decision Environment Regarding Refugees in Britain and Canada

This thesis studies media frames as reflections of decision making environments. This has especially been examined in relation to the decision making environment that existed in Canada and the United Kingdom in relation to the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the time frame between January 2009 and December 2016. To identify the decision making environments, the content of the population of audio visual news pieces (1115 pieces) aired by Global News, CBC, Sky News and BBC about Syrian refugees were coded by ’Atlas.ti’. Five generic frames were used to determine the nature of the content and a number of sub-frames were used to identify the direction of the frames. As a supplementary step, the general patterns identified in the examined news networks were classified and an insight into the decision making environments was provided on this basis. This was done with a special attention to identifying possible securitizing patterns in the media. The identified environments were then examined in the context of the poliheuristic model of decision making. By demonstrating the predictive capacity of studying media frames and framing patterns, the thesis suggests that the media expose their audience to a dominant decision making environment in relation to an issue of concern and stabilize that decision making environment by repeatedly exposing their audience to the same framing patterns. Keywords: decision-making environments, foreign policy, media frames, poliheuristic model, refugees, securitization theory