Immigration Coverage in the Black Press and the General Audience Press: What Can Mixed Methods Reveal about Race and Immigration?

ABSTRACT

This paper has two aims. First, we apply Bourdieu’s field theory to investigate media discourse on race and immigration, demonstrating how features of news organizations influence news content. Second, we compare contemporary natural language processing (NLP) techniques with qualitative hand-coding. Extending a previous study, we compare newspaper articles from the mainstream and black press in Atlanta. We find significant differences in both word-use and topical coverage in immigration articles aimed at the two audiences. With a focus on organizational resources and values, our quantitative approach to field theory facilitates a better understanding of the journalistic landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• methodology
• culture; racial and ethnic minorities

Notes

1. We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that we use our analyses to build on field theory and highlighting the relevance of Rohlinger’s work.

2. The term, “black Twitter,” broadly refers to “a public group of millions of black users on Twitter “networking, connecting, and engaging with others who have similar concerns, experiences, tastes, and cultural practices” (Daniels 2013:225, cited in Rathnayake, Winter, and Buente 2018).

3. Browne, Deckard, and Rodriguez (2016) generously shared their data and coding sheets with us, and provided detailed explanations of their methods.

4. Our sample includes 9 articles that were not in Browne, Deckard, and Rodriguez (2016) Daily World corpus. Four of these had been drawn and excluded by Browne, Deckard, and Rodriguez (2016) after they determined that the articles were not about immigrants or immigration. If these articles are peripheral to immigration issues, then the topic models should detect this (the articles will contribute very little to the 15 topics that the procedure identifies). Five articles were missed by Browne et al. when they drew their original sample. At the time, early editions of the Daily World were on microfiche. We re-drew the sample using an online database.

5. The green highlight in Figure 2 indicates that “hate crimes” appears significantly more frequently in the Daily World. The x-axis shows the amount of decrease or increase in topic prevalence between the two publications.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Irene Browne

Irene Browne is associate professor of sociology at Emory University. Her research focuses on the topics of immigration, race, and social class and their intersections. You can contact her at: Dept. of Sociology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322. Email: [email protected]

John A. Bernau

John A. Bernau is a postdoctoral fellow in Digital Scholarship at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. His research focuses on the use and evolution of language, especially in religious contexts, as well as recent developments in computational text analysis.

Katharine Tatum

Katharine Tatum received her PhD in sociology from Emory University in 2021. She currently works as a behavioral scientist at Peraton, a contractor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Jiao Jieyu

Jiao Jieyu received her BA degree at Emory University. She is currently an Emory research fellow.