Volunteers on the Balkan route - heroes or villains? Media coverage and public response to the volunteer movement in the Czech Republic
Abstract
In summer 2015 Czech media started to show more and more pictures from the so called Balkan migration route. While many analyses had already been done of the media coverage of the so called refugee crisis, I would like to choose two particular media representations of refugees that provoked two specific responses from the audience - ie. refugees as security thread and refugees as victims in need of help.
As it follows from available data these two representations were prevalent. In this context, the volunteer movement (mostly consisting of people in so called Czech Team) is only logical response to the second media image of refugees, ie. the "helpless victims" representation.
From september 2015 untill May 2015, almost 3000 people went volunteering to the Balkans and/or Greece. Besides being an important player in the delivery of humanitarian aid, the Czech volunteers also played a very important role as information providers to journalist.
The aim of the paper is to explore the dialectics of the mutual relationship of journalist (media producers) and volunteers as both objects/subjects of the reporting and information sources. Two main narratives occur here - when refugees are depicted as thread, volunteers are thus consequently seen as villains, who help the foreign invasion to destroy our civilization.
In the case of the "helpless victims" image, volunteers are seen as heroes, who tell the stories of those in need. In this case, volunteers are the voice of refugees in the media.
I will argue that the concept of cultural hybridity (for example Fischer 1994) lies in the background of this widespread media tactics, when the stories of "the Others" (refugees) need to be translated into "our" language (the volunteer stories) in order to be heard and understood. Refugees are reduced to cultural "Others", either mystically attractive or dangerous, but their voice as humans with everyday motivations, mundane needs and real life stories remains silent.