Article: The Role of Political Leaning on Immigration News Framing. The Case of the US During the Trump Era
The study “The Role of Political Leaning on Immigration News Framing. The Case of the US During the Trump Era” by Eduard Fabregat from Fordham University and Fernando Severino from Illinois State University looked at news frames and depiction of immigration by 13 online news sources. The context was U.S. discussion during president Donald Trump’s first term.
There is a common assumption that news media is biased and ideological when covering immigration, in the US meaning “Liberal” vs. “Conservative”, or blue vs red. News framing, on the other hand, means selecting certain story elements to create a specific interpretation of the news. Understanding news framing is essential due to its potential impact.
Immigrants tend to be underrepresented in news media, according to Fabregat (2016) and Trebbe & Schoenhagen (2011). They are generally linked to negative frames such as presenting them as economic, cultural, or criminal threats, or through the security frame. J. Kim and Wanta (2018) identified six frames in US coverage during election years: conflict, human interest, horse race, responsibility, economic consequences, and thematic.
The authors ask two research questions and make two hypotheses. The research questions are: RQ1, how do the frames in immigration news coverage change during the first Trump administration (2017–2020)? And RQ2: what frames did the Conservative, Liberal, and Center leaning online news media in the United States use to depict immigration between 2017 and 2020? The hypotheses are H1: Online outlets with a marked political leaning (Liberal and Conservative) and outlets without a marked political leaning (Center) will show differences in frames of immigration news reporting from 2017 to 2020. And H2: Conservative news websites will show a distinct news framing in reporting immigration compared to Liberal and Center leaning news media from 2017 to 2020.
The corpus for analysis consisted of 30,064 news articles from 13 U.S. news outlets between January 2017 and November 2020. Some were native-digital, others legacy media with online presence. The researchers employed the ANTMN method (i.e., Analysis of Topic Models Network), identifying news frames using LDA topic modelling.
The research showed four dominant news frames across Liberal, Conservative, and Center leaning news media: Conflict, Ideological, Policy Change, and Economy. This answered RQ2. For RQ1, increased coverage showed changes in the usage of Economy and Policy Changes frames for Liberal and Conservative outlets. Conversely, they tended to cover immigration from an ideological perspective.
Hypothesis 1 was supported, as media outlets showed significantly different frame usage from the Center-leaning news in most cases, except the Conflict frame. There were also differences across time.
However, hypothesis 2 was not supported, as it was, instead of Conservatives it was the Center leaning online news media that showed the most differentiated approach. Both Liberal and Conservative outlets used Ideology frame as their default frame.
In conclusion, the research provided fresh evidence to confront the claim that all news media is “ideological”, instead, there are still news organizations in the U.S. that focus less on ideological debates and ideological framing on immigration topics. There were limitations in the research and further research could ascertain the tone and coverage differences within the Ideological frame.
The article “The Role of Political Leaning on Immigration News Framing. The Case of the US During the Trump Era” by Eduard Fabregat and Fernando Severino is in Southern Communication Journal. (Free abstract).
Picture: On the edge of Liberty by Fabian Fauth.
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