The Usual Suspects: Offender Origin, Media Reporting and Natives’ Attitudes Towards Immigration (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Logic of Fear: Populism and Media Coverage of Immigrant Crimes
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 "minaret ban" referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People's Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with terrorism and violence. We combine an exhaustive violent crime detection dataset with detailed information on crime coverage from 12 newspapers. The data allow us to quantify the extent of pre-vote media bias in the coverage of migrant criminality. We then estimate a theory-based voting equation in the cross-section of municipalities. Exploiting random variations in crime occurrences, we find a first-order, positive effect of news coverage on political support for the minaret ban. Counterfactual simulations show that, under a law forbidding newspapers to disclose a perpetrator's nationality, the vote in favor of the ban would have decreased by 5 percentage points (from 57.6% to 52.6%).
It is still not well understood how the media affect anti-immigrant party voting. In this paper, we argue and demonstrate empirically that mere exposure to immigration-and crime-related news is positively related to the likelihood that a voter casts a vote for an anti-immigrant party. On the basis of a media content analysis (N = 20,084 news items) in combination with a voter panel survey (N = 17,014 respondents) conducted in 11 European countries we find for several anti-immigrant parties that e ceteris paribus e exposure to news about immigration or crime increases voters' probabilities to vote for these parties. We discuss our findings in light of prior research on issue ownership, and their implications for the role of the mass media in established democracies.
The Logic of Fear - Populism and the Media Coverage of Immigrant Crimes
2019
We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 "minaret ban" referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People's Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with terrorism and violence. We combine an exhaustive violent crime detection dataset with detailed information on crime coverage from 12 newspapers. The data allow us to quantify the extent of pre-vote media bias in the coverage of migrant criminality. We then estimate a theory-based voting equation in the cross-section of municipalities. Exploiting random variations in crime occurrences, we find a first-order, positive effect of news coverage on political support for the minaret ban. Counterfactual simulations show that, under a law forbidding newspapers to disclose a perpetrator's nationality, the vote in favor of the ban would have decreased by 5 percentage points (from 57.6% to 52.6%).
How come you're not a criminal? Immigrant stereotyping and ethnic profiling in the press
2013
This paper deals with prejudiced discourse in mainstream newspapers. It traces the use of loaded questions that reveal unquestioned stereotypes and biased assumptions on the part of the media in matters involving the representation of victims and perpetrators of criminal offences committed by minority groups. The analysis is based on a qualitative critical analysis of two cases that show how the media prejudicially handle the minorities. The first case deals with how the media uselessly probe into family matters in order to evoke the majority group's ethnic stereotypes, thereby putting the minority group on the defensive. The second case shows how proper names and category labels can be used to cancel out negative stereotypes arising from foreign origin, as long as another out-group could be targeted through negative stereotyping. Through the use of specific micro-level discursive strategies, the media contribute to the ethnic profiling of minority groups and contribute to the polarization of the society in terms of "us" vs. "them".
Crime, foreigners and hard news: A cross-national comparison of reporting and public perception
Journalism, 2010
The Finnish media devote more attention to hard news than the British media, yet Finns are less interested in politics than the British. The principal reason for this difference in news values is that Finnish TV is more subject to public service influence than British TV, and the Finnish press is more strongly influenced by a professional journalistic culture than its British counterpart. While a number of national differences contribute to different levels of public knowledge, the Finns are better informed about hard news topics partly because they are better briefed in these areas by their media.
Picturing immigration: how the media criminalizes immigrants
Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2018
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that the way the press frames policy issues can foster fear, particularly with respect to portrayals of immigrants. Building on this research, we examine images of immigrants, borders, and legality in the media's coverage of immigration. To do so, we collect a unique dataset of images appearing in three major national news magazines' articles about immigration or immigrants in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010. We code the images based on whether they include visual representations of the border and immigration enforcement, whether illegality and/or criminal behavior is shown or implied, and the activities in which the immigrants are engaged. We find that the press frequently portrays immigrants as undocumented, presenting images of the border as well as immigrant arrests and detentions. Moreover, when immigrants are working, they are disproportionately engaged in low-skilled activities. Our analysis demonstrates a general tendency to frame immigrants in a negative light, consistent with a "threat" narrative but inconsistent with actual immigrant demographics. Our findings are particularly important in light of research establishing that such portrayals contribute to more hostile attitudes about immigration in the U.S. as well as greater support for punitive immigration policy among Whites.
Stephan Pruss_The German Media’s Portrayal of Ethnic Organised Crime and Its Implications
The media have played an important role in the portrayal of ethnic organised crime (OC). This research note is based on a content analysis on the framing of the emergence and continued existence of ethnic OC in German media, for which 163 news magazine articles were examined from 1999 until 2013. The results of this analysis show that the media under review tends to externalise ethnic OC and portray it within the rational choice and alien conspiracy frames. This research note outlines some implications of this analysis. In this regard, the depiction of ethnic OC might fuel stereotypes, serve populists aims in exploiting the issue, and criminalise entire ethnic minorities in the eyes of the public and some policy-makers. Thus, we suggest that the category of ethnicity in OC portrayal and research should undergo a re-evaluation due to these possible implications.
Framing the others: news and ethnic prejudice
2007
Introduction 1 1.1 Problem definition 7 1.2 Outline of the book 9 2. Introducing the cases-Germany and the Netherlands 12 2.1 The current situation 13 2.2 Immigration in the post World War II period. 16 2.3 Relevant contexts 19 2.4 Media in Germany and the Netherlands. 23 3. Ethnic attitudes and the news: towards a conceptual framework 26 3.1 Defining the object 26 3.2 Ethnic attitudes 28 3.2.1 Dimensions of ethnic attitudes 29 3.2.2 Ethnic prejudice and ethnic threat perceptions theoretical and methodological concerns 35 3.2.3 Explaining ethnic prejudice 39 3.2.4 Outlining a basic model 42 3.2.5 Prejudice and information 43 VI Framing the Others 3.3 Review of prior studies on news, ethnic minorities and ethnic attitudes 3.4 Media effects 3.4.1 Agenda-setting and priming 3.4.2 Framing 3.4.2.1 Valence frames 3.4.2.2 Framing effects-a psychological model 3.4.2.3 Constituents of news frames 3.5 News information and prejudice formation-a synthesis 4. Modeling the impact of news exposure on ethnic threat perceptions. 4.1 Information sources and ethnic prejudice-a model 4.2 Methods 4.2.1 ESS 2002-measurement and descriptive statistics 4.2.2 Analyses 4.3 Results 4.4 Conclusion and Discussion 5. 'Media Shocks': Ethnic minority news coverage and antiimmigration sentiments in overtime perspective 5.1 News as context 5.2 Overtime perspectives on news and ethnic attitudes 5.3 Hypotheses 5.4 Methods 5.4.1 Data 5.4.2 Analysis 5.5 Results 5.6 Conclusion and Discussion 6. 'Decomposing' exposure: News content and its effects 6.1 Media effects on ethnic attitudes 6.2 Frequency, tone, and framesmedia effects and media content 6.3 Measuring media exposure to determine media effects 6.4 Media coverage of ethnic minorities and effects in Germany
Perceptions of immigrant criminality: Crime and social boundaries
Sociological Quarterly, 2014
Researchers studying the relationship between immigration and crime frequently note the discrepancy between actual rates and public perceptions of criminal behavior by immigrants. Analyzing staff and reader generated texts in a local newspaper, we find that this connection is maintained through a conflation of key terms, assumptions of the legal status of immigrants, and a focus on high-profile criminal acts. We argue that the discourse of immigrant criminality has been critical in constructing social boundaries used in recent immigration legislation. Our analysis helps explain why current scholarly findings on immigration and crime have had little influence in changing public opinion. Our elected officials in Washington don't get it. Illegal immigrants have broken the law, and let's not forget the people who hired them. Those employers paid the immigrants below the minimum wage. That's against the law, and they should be heavily fined. I came to this country legally by applying and waiting for my background to be checked. .. What's wrong with these illegals not doing the same? (Last Word, Virginia Gazette, April 12, 2006) Researchers studying the relationship between immigration and crime frequently note the discrepancy between actual rates and public perceptions of criminal behavior by immigrants (Hagan and Palloni 1999; Sampson 2008). A growing body of literature shows that immigrants are less likely to engage in crime than U.S.-born citizens (
Mass Communication and Society
Although prior studies investigating immigration news typically documented a dominant focus on negativity and threats, only limited empirical research is available, which scrutinizes the way real-world developments affect these patterns in immigration news. This study aims to fill this void. First, we report results of a large-scale and longitudinal content analysis (N = 4,340,757) of trends in immigration news coverage in two Western European cases, Flanders (the northern, Dutch-speaking, largest region of Belgium) and the Netherlands, from 1999 to 2015. Both the salience of immigration as a news topic on itself and its linkages with three prominent issues (i.e., crime, terrorism, and socioeconomic issues) are explored. Second, this study builds on previous insights by comparing dynamics in immigration news to realworld events and developments. Overall, the results show that the linkage of immigration to issues of crime, terrorism, and the economy in Flemish and Dutch newspapers was considerable throughout the 17-year period under study. Yet there is limited evidence for a close relationship between news and real-life developments; hence, trends in immigration news seem largely unaffected by trends in society.