Framing Irregular Immigration in Western Media

Abstract

The media coverage of irregular immigration has the power to influence public opinion, fuel the formation of popular movements, and mold the political climate related to immigration. Based on comparative and multimethod data sets, this special issue of American Behavioral Scientist contributes to a renewed understanding of the role and impact of the mass media on the current climate, opinions, and policies related to irregular immigration in three different Western countries. Analysis of source strategies and ethnographic methods is combined with large-scale quantitative content analysis of news and surveys measuring the reception of this news coverage by audiences in the United States, France, and Norway. The research design pursued in this special issue of American Behavioral Scientist identifies (a) the dominant voices, narratives, and arguments in the mainstream media coverage of irregular immigration; (b) how stakeholders work strategically to promote their messages in the media; and (c) what attitudes the public holds about the coverage of irregular immigration in the media, and how these media evaluations relate to their attitudes toward immigration. Together, the articles in this issue offer new and surprising insights into how a controversial and important issue is strategically framed, covered in the news, and understood among the audience.

“We Cannot Let Them Die”: Undocumented Immigrants and Media Framing of Health Deservingness in the United States

“…With the competition for news, journalists and editors hope to attract readers by developing expressive stories that presumably catch people’s attention more easily (Figenschou & Thorbjørnsrud, 2015; Thorbjørnsrud, 2015). By letting immigrants speak for themselves, the NYT calls on its readership to have empathy toward them.…”

“…Furthermore, little is known about the policy arguments and news representations that support immigrants’ inclusion into the U.S. health care safety net. Media framing has the power to shape the opinion of wide audiences that ultimately fuel both pro- and anti-immigrant social movements (Freeman, Hansen, & Leal, 2013; Thorbjørnsrud, 2015). Therefore, an understanding of the main frames publicized by leading media outlets can shed light on the direction of public opinion toward supporting either progressive or regressive immigration policy.…”

Framing migration and the process of crimmigration: A systematic analysis of the media representation of unauthorized immigrants in the Netherlands

“…In general there is no lack of scholarly attention for the representations of migrants and other minorities in Western media, although Thorbjornsrud (2015) notes that the number of studies that focus specifically on unauthorized immigrants is relatively small. Most of this research has been more or less a critique of the media, focusing on negative depictions of immigrants and minorities that demonstrate an underlying structural bias in the media – or even society at large ( Bleich et al, 2015a ).…”

“…Because a large number of these researchers also take an explicit stand, such studies have sometimes been criticized for lacking representativeness and being subject to ‘cherry-picking’, where researchers select only those articles that confirm their existing beliefs and initial hypotheses ( Hier, 2009 ; Koller and Mautner, 2004 ; Orpin, 2005 ; Stubbs, 1994 ). Several more recent studies have therefore employed more systematic and comparative methods, resulting in various articles demonstrating the complexity of immigration coverage and challenging the idea that the media are intrinsically biased and consistently engage in negative framing of immigrants and minorities ( Bleich et al, 2015b ; Caviedes, 2015 ; Hallin, 2015 ; Lawlor, 2015 ; Thorbjornsrud, 2015 ; Tolley, 2015 ). Yet, despite these important methodological advances, none of these studies employs what we believe to be one of the most promising approaches towards media analyses: a corpus linguistics approach.…”

Informing Realities

“…Newspapers in New Zealand, for example, became more sympathetic towards migrants after 2000 (Spoonley and Butcher 2009), while Canadian newspapers have tended to display more positive sentiment, especially since 2004 (Lawlor 2015). One type of sympathetic coverage depicts refugees, asylum seekers, or other types of migrants as victims in need of humanitarian assistance (Thorbjørnsrud 2015), as shown in studies of media in France (Benson 2013), the Netherlands (Lecheler et al 2015), and South Korea (Park 2014). Media in migrant-sending countries, including Vietnam, have recently produced more positive content about migrants-although, overall, coverage remains mostly negative (McAuliffe et al 2015).…”