The role of linguistic choices and stylistic and visual devices in constructing representations of the Cutro shipwreck: A multimodal analysis of British online news with a focus on headlines

The issue of migration has long been a key theme for political debates across many European countries. In 2015, following the culmination of several conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, many chose to move to Europe in search of better living conditions. From that moment on, the European ‘refugee crisis’ was marked by the arrival of over a million migrants through land and sea migratory routes. Within this context, one of the busiest migratory routes was the Central Mediterranean, often crossed on small precarious boats. Henceforth, the increasing number of maritime disasters and deaths at sea gradually became a global concern and was recognised as newsworthy. Given the unprecedented scale of migrant shipwrecks, media has had a prominent role in shaping the public perception of these tragic events. Within this framework, the present research aims at analysing news headlines extracted from four British online newspapers across the political spectrum, namely the right-wing Daily Mail and The Telegraph, and the center-left The Guardian and BBC News. In particular, this study focuses on the role of stylistic, linguistic and visual devices in the news construction of the migrant shipwreck off the Italian coast of Steccato di Cutro, which took place on 26th February 2023. To investigate the interplay between written and visual content, this research relies on Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) and Multimodal News Analysis (MNA).