Local and National Accounts of Immigration Framing in a Cross-national Perspective

Abstract

The aim of this article is to identify whether differences exist in local and national news framing of immigration. Using 12 years (2001–2012) of print media data from 15 Canadian and British print media sources, this article presents the first attempt to look for systematic differences in cross-city, within-country and cross-national framing on the subject of immigration. Contextual variables such as change in the unemployment rate and in the rate of foreign-born within cities and countries are introduced to test the robustness of the findings from a computer-automated content analysis. Findings suggest that, contrary to expectations, there is little by way of systematic evidence that national and local newspapers frame immigration according to different concerns. Furthermore, cross-city news coverage does not vary based on local contextual factors such as changes in the unemployment rate or rate of foreign-born. Indeed, it would appear that there is little evidence to support hypotheses that local coverage attends only to the ‘local consequences’ of immigration such as crime and unemployment, and that national concerns such as border security and broader economic outlook are solely the purview of national media. Rather, there are far fewer differences in the content and tone of immigration framing among print news sources than conventional wisdom might suggest.

Keywords:

• Immigration
• National Media
• Local Media
• Framing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] Fryberg et al. (2012) and Cheng et al. (2011) provide two useful exceptions of variation in regional framing in the American and Spanish context, but they do not explicitly compare widespread local coverage with national coverage.

[2] Following on Donsbach and Patterson (2004) and Statham (2010), this article defines journalists as including those who are involved in editorial decision-making, story selection and presentation and actual reporting.

[3] Gateways are described as metropolitan areas with populations of over one million that contain foreign-born population averages that are higher than the national average (Singer 2004). Traditional gateways are described as those cities where foreign-born populations have been higher than the national average in every decade since 1950, while newer immigrant gateways need only meet that criterion in more recent years. This definition has been modified slightly to fit the British and Canadian contexts.

[4] The sample does not include the Daily Mail or The Sun, the two top circulating papers (both tabloids) in the UK. These were purposefully excluded to facilitate better comparison between Canadian and British national papers since Canada does not have a national tabloid industry that is comparable to that of the UK. It is also worth noting that the included local media sources that have been identified as tabloids (e.g., the Birmingham Mail) are not directly comparable to the ‘red-top’ national British tabloid market that focuses on sensationalism and celebrity news over political or economic reporting; rather, they are generally considered ‘mid-market’ tabloids, which are less prone to sensationalising news.

[5] Note that Montreal, Canada would normally be considered a traditional immigrant gateway. However, it is excluded from this analysis given that only English language media coverage is used in this article to prevent drawing comparisons across languages (French and English). I opted not to use the Montreal Gazette as a proxy for all Montreal news coverage since its anticipated audience would largely be the Montreal Anglophone population, which tends to have a different political profile than the rest of Montreal residents.

[6] The complete dictionary is available from author on request.

[7] Some framing cues, of course, will be inherently negative (e.g., many words in the security dictionary such as ‘threat’ will also be in the negative tone dictionary). To prevent the duplication of negative dictionary entries and dictionary words in the analysis, I removed all words that are contained in both the frame dictionary and the negative and positive Lexicoder Sentiment dictionary. This may result in an underestimation of the negativity associated with some frame cues, but it decreases the chance of having false positives in the measurement.

[8] Note that for this analysis, I divided the total number of frames by the number of papers per media type. This prevents new gateway papers from outweighing other newspaper types simply because there are more (4) of them.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible through financial support from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.