The role of immigration news as a contextual-level factor for anti-immigrant attitudes: The effect of tone and threat frames

The main objective of this PhD dissertation is to apply theories from intergroup relations literature to media effect studies to obtain a better insight in how immigration news coverage as an aspect of the intergroup context affects native citizens’ attitudes toward immigration. The primary research question is as follows: how does immigration news coverage as a contextual-level factor contribute to attitudes toward immigration. This research question can be splitted into three main research goals: 1. The systematic study of the content of immigration news in terms of tone and use of threat frames, building upon intergroup threat theory; 2. The examination of the relationship between exposure to immigration news and anti-immigrant attitudes; 3. The exploration of the underlying process, building further on intergroup threat theory, through which news consumption affects anti-immigrant attitudes. This PhD project is an interdisciplinary project, in which concepts from political science, literature from media studies and theories from social psychology are employed to build a bridge between the various academic disciplines. In this way, I build further on extant research and offer a contribution to the literature via expanding the scope in a number of ways. The central contribution to the scientific literature stems from the intention to provide a comprehensive and systematic approach. I make use of a combination of quantitative research methods—content analysis, survey analysis and an experiment—to deepen our understanding of the complex relationship between news, threat perceptions and anti-immigrant attitudes. The context studied present two Western European case studies, Flanders and the Netherlands. With regard to the content of immigration news (goal 1), the results are clear-cut. Immigration news is mostly negative, while positive news about immigrants is very rare. Additionally, news often contains references to threat frames, which depict immigrants as posing a threat to the host society and its members: more than half of the news stories about North African immigrants contains threat frames. The most prevalent threat frames are criminal threats, followed by cultural threats and to a lesser extent economic threat. Remarkable in this regard is that often multiple threat frames are combined in one news story: the most often made combination are cultural and criminal threat frames. Analysis of trend over time shows that the use of threat frames is rising over time. Put differently: there is a negativity bias in immigration news coverage. In conclusion, news about immigration can be considered as an aspect of the intergroup context, in which mostly negative news, problems and threat frames are predominant. In this way, immigration news has the potential to operate as an information environment in which a collection of arguments about immigration are being promoted to which native citizens may be exposed, which subsequently may exert a profound influence on their attitudes about immigration. Exposure to negative and threathening news content about immigratie has consequences for native citizens’ threat perceptions and attitudes toward immigration (goal 2): particularly exposure to negative news and cultural and criminal threat frames exert a strong influence, while the direct effects of exposure to positive news and economic threat are rather diffuse and somewhat less persistent. If natives are simultaneously exposed to criminal, cultural and economic threat frames, they tend to select the most threatening frame: criminal threat. The effects of exposure to criminal threat is decisive: this is probably due to its prevalence in the news, the specific way in which crime stories are being framed (in an episodical manner, black-white, with clear responsibility attribution), due to its personal and proximate nature, and due to the extreme risky nature of the threat. The negativity bias also seems to be at play when considering media effects: negative and threatening news is widespread, which makes this type of information easy to activate and apply in subsequent judgment. It seems that native citizens are especially ready to adopt threat frames which are congruent with prior knowledge (amongst others constructed by the news media) about a specific immigrant group. In a next step the underlying mechanism or exact process through which news exposure exerts influence on anti-immigrant attitudes is further explored into detail (goal 3). To this end, again an appeal is made upon intergroup relations literature, which is adopted as basis to empirically test a set of mediators. At least three mediators seem to be at play: perceived immigrant size, fear of crime, and perceptions and emotions about the economy. First, the visibility of immigration on the news results in an overestimation of the number of immigrants in society, which in turn leads to more negative attitudes toward immigrants. Second, the salience of crime as news topic and possibly the emphasis of involvement of immigrants in crime makes that native citizens who regularly watch television news become more fearful to become a victim of crime. This subsequently results in more negative attitudes with regard to immigration. Finally, news consumption – e.g. news about the economy and economic threats posed by immigrants – leads to the development of negative perceptions and emotions about the economy, which subsequently again results in anti-immigrant attitudes. The results in this dissertation as such shed more light on the underlying characteristics of news and the exact mechanism through which news effects come about. Still, nuance is in order. The content of immigration news and the effects of news exposure are partly dependent upon the specific type of broadcaster: the public broadcaster pays somewhat more attention to positive news stories and less often makes an appeal to sensational and tabloid reporting styles. Immigration news on the commercial broadcaster is more often negative, makes use of personal perspectives, rather than offering context and background information. The connection between immigration and soft news topics (such as crime) is more prevalent on commercial news. There is some evidence that people who prefer public news are slightly more positive toward immigrants. Furthermore, it seems that exposure to television news has stronger attitudinal consequences compared to newspaper exposure. Finally, especially soft and popular genres of news exert influence on threat perceptions and attitudes toward immigrants. Hence, this dissertation demonstrates that immigration news is not uniform, and that differentiating between various types of genres, broadcasters and content is a fruitful strategy, which to some extent offer a more qualified vision. An innovative finding is that a hierarchy exists in the way different types of minority groups are being depicted on the news: not all groups are portrayed in an evenly positively or negatively manner. The level and the type of threat frames that are being emphasised differs across outgroups: Roma, North Africans and Eastern Europeans are depicted in a more negative and threatening manner compared to Jews and LGBT. This is subsequently reflected in attitudes toward these various minority groups: the hierarchy in news coverage runs perfectly synchronous to the hierarchy in attitudes. Those groups that are most negatively portrayed and most often associated with threat frames are most negatively judged by the audience. Hence, news does not only operate as a contextual-level factor for anti-immigrant attitudes in general, but can also offer an explanation for a hierarchy in evaluations. News promotes specific arguments in the intergroup context, making some characteristics and threats more salient dependent upon the particular outgroup, which subsequently gives rise to differences in attitudes. The reach of news exposure are wider than previously documented: exposure to a news story about a particular immigrant group has consequences for the evaluation of other minority groups as well. This mainly holds for positive news: when natives were exposed to a positive news story about North African immigrants, they also became more positive toward other immigrant groups. This finding sheds more light on the applicability and reach of news, while showing that effects of news tone differ for direct versus carry-over effects. Finally, there is only limited evidence that immigration news presents a correct reflection of reality: the patterns and trends in immigration news are largely independent of developments and events occurring in society.status: publishe