News production on the arrival of migrants by sea to Spanish coasts: the case of the Balearic Islands

Resumen

This article explores the communicative strategies of journalists and institutional offices on the arrival of migrants by sea to Spanish coasts through a case study: the Balearic Islands. For this purpose, media studies and critical approaches to the performativity of borders are taken as a starting point. The results indicate the emission of numerical, serialized and single source information in the case of the institutions, reactive in the case of the managing organizations and conditioned by institutional processes of securitization of migrations in the case of journalists, who focus their work on the reproduction of the number of arrivals and on the procedural deployment associated with the immigration law, generating a redundant informative effect on the procedures of “immigration management”. The study shows the need to analyze the media representation of migration in terms of its governance.