Gilberto Alves Araújo, Gizélia Maria da Silva Freitas, Eliene Rodrigues Sousa
This paper examines how South African news constructs Black migrants’ “victimhood” as a porous macro-frame in which compassion can coexist with othering. Grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis, especially Fairclough’s Dialectical-Relational Approach, and articulated with Global South critique, it integrates corpus linguistics and multimodal analysis. The dataset comprises 694 articles/editorials and 164 images (2008-2019) from five newspapers, analyzed via AntConc (keywords, concordances) and visual-grammar indicators (gaze, distance, angle, etc.). Results show persistent collectivizing labels such as “foreign” that thin personhood into a social type; strong voice inequality, with migrants nearly six times less likely to be directly quoted; and visuals that reinforce hierarchy through limited angles/distances, often high-angle shots that position migrants as vulnerable and less agentive.