This article carries out a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) of a Romanian Facebook page where comments are made in response to a shared news-clip showing a Roma wedding which clearly invites ridicule. It has been documented that there are well-established discourses representing the Roma as criminal, uneducated, dirty, immoral, and as resisting assimilation into wider society. This Facebook page offers the opportunity to explore which discourses are used in 1500 posts to represent the Roma. We show that the affordances of Facebook open-up the mixing of humor, venting of frustration, extreme racism and sexual violence as those posting entertain each other, create bonds and overtly call out the Roma and others who are believed to be part of a conspiracy against ordinary Romanians. We argue that these newer patterns of representing the Roma are related to the rise of extreme right-wing populist ideology across Europe and beyond. An ideology where direct, simple and violent solutions are required.

In this article, we carry out a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) of a sample from a larger corpus of Romanian news articles that covered the controversial camp evictions and repatriation of Romanian Roma migrants from France that began in 2010 and continue to the time of writing in 2017. These French government policies have been highly criticized both within France and by international political and aid organizations. However, the analysis shows how these brutal, anti-humanitarian events became recontextualized in the Romanian Press to represent the French government’s actions as peaceful and consensual. In addition, the demonization of the Roma in the press serves as a strategy to continuously disassociate them from their Romanian counterparts. While there is a long history of discrimination against the Roma in Romania, these particular recontextualizations can be understood in the context of the Romanian government’s need to gloss over its failure to comply with the Schengen accession requirements and acquire full European Union (EU) membership.

This particular study is part of a larger research project on ‘Discursive Representations of the Roma in European Media’. It focuses on the discursive representations of the Roma community in two influential Romanian newspapers, which are available both inprint and online. Drawing on a critical perspective, I intend to reveal the global forms of representation of this ethnic group and other social actors in two well-known daily broadsheets which are believed to be the leading newspapers on the Romanian market. The study includes the analysis of the most frequent themes in which Roma are portrayed explicitly or implicitly, along with the semantic macrostructure of the selected news reports published within a four-year period (2011-2014). Employing a variety of approaches under the repertoire of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper illustrates how Romanian newspapers build the discourse surrounding the Roma minority, especially in the post European Union accession context. First, I argue that Romanianmedia coverage of Roma issues is influenced or tries to imitate western media, especially British and French press; the construct of reverse discourse is used to legitimize or delegitimize controversial actions in which Roma/Romanians make headlines in the international news. It is also my query that political affiliation and sympathy of the selected newspapers do not influence the talk about Roma to a large extent. Secondly, in the context of European integration, the institutionalized discourse of recognition is based on a politics of universalism, where integration equals assimilation, abandonment of cultural identities, and the realization of a homogenous society