News stories and images of immigration online: A quantitative analysis of digital-native and traditional news websites of different political orientations and social media engagement

ABSTRACT

The study employed a quantitative content analysis of stories (N = 1200) and photographs (N = 1200) to examine how U.S. digital-native and traditional news websites of different political orientations (right-leaning vs left-leaning) represented immigration in frames, topics and visual frames. Social media engagement was also analyzed to understand how people react to news content. Both in stories and images, left-leaning news websites focused more often on victimization, while right-leaning outlets emphasized threat. This trend was even more pronounced among digital-native news websites. Traditional left-leaning news sites generated the highest number of social media interactions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary meterial

supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ A detailed description of the operationalization of topics, frames and visual frames is provided in Appendix A.