According to political philosopher, Thomas Nail, ‘The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant’ (Nail, 2015: 1). In 2015 alone, over one million refugees, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, risked their lives in unseaworthy vessels to reach the shores of Europe. An unparalleled phenomenon, the ‘migrant crisis’ has fuelled racist tendencies in popular political discourse and become the focus of the world’s news media. Starting from Bourdieu’s premise that language is always a form of symbolic power (1992: 142), this contribution does not focus on counter-narratives but investigates the Fourth Estate’s representation of the migrant through the language of conflict in Italian and Anglophone newspaper discourse. Prejudice and racism in news media is not new; nor is its critical analysis (Bañón, 2000; Baker et al., 2008; van Dijk, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1998, 2009, 2014; Teo, 2000; Reisigl and Wodak, 2001, Wodak, 2008). However, while most scholarship has focused on the phenomenon from a monolingual and cultural perspective, far less research has been carried out adopting a comparative lens across lingua-cultural boundaries. The pan European moral panic over the ‘migrant crisis’ provides an opportunity to view the power structures linked to media discourse and the possible influence on the audience in a transcultural frame. The ideological stances in media reports on the migrant ‘Crisis’ both from the Italian and British perspective are observed by using perspectives and methodologies of critical discourse analysis viewed as “an academic movement, a way of doing discourse analysis from a critical perspective, which often focuses on theoretical concepts such as power, ideology and domination” (Baker et al., 2008). The concept of power as manifested by the ideological use of language in mediatizing and relaying information surrounding the events unfolding across Europe is central to the research. Two datasets comprising Italian and English news texts were sourced through newspaper databases and constructed around two different time windows, August and November 2015. Data was selected on the basis of some particularly controversial lexical choices, such as ‘migrant’ and the use of metaphor in relaying information on refugees and their circumstances. The contribution concludes with some tentative indications of audience response via readers’ below the line comments to certain particularly inflammatory news texts. The study concludes with a reflection on the status quo of racism in the news after nearly thirty-five years of CDA. Considering news as narrative (Lopocaro, 2005, Baker 2006, 2007), the contribution specifically investigates the following news stories as communicative events that provoked media debates across the two respective linguistic and cultural spaces: The Washington Post (24 August 2015) asks ‘Is it time to ditch the word “migrant?”’, while Al Jazeera declares it will not use the term (Malone, 2015). The BBC (Ruz, 28 August 2015), on the one hand, defends the use of the lexeme quoting its dictionary definition. British tabloid The Sun stirs heated debate with the editorial ‘migrants are like cockroaches’ (Hopkins, 2015), and former British Prime Minister David Cameron is quoted as referring to swarms of migrants during the so-called ‘Calais Crisis’ (Taylor, Wintour and Elgot, 2015). Following the Paris bombing, Italian politician Giorgia Meloni says ‘gli immigrati clandestini devono tornare a casa loro’ [illegal Immigrants must go home] (Il Tempo 15 November 2015), while the editor of the Italian newspaper Libero (Belpietro 14 November 2015) published a front page editorial under the headline “Bastardi Islamici”, generating discussions as to the legality and ethics of such a title.