Pandemic Politics: Immigration, Framing, and COVID-19

• In Event: Media in the Time of COVID

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic, and President Trump’s characterization of it as the “China virus”, has led to an increasing centralization of “health threat” narratives in right-wing elite rhetoric towards, and media coverage of, immigration policy. This stereotyping of immigrant communities as unclean and carriers of disease is nothing new in this country, but there is little research to date looking at the effect that covid-19 has had on the prevalence of these narratives, and how this is in turn affecting discussions of immigration policy. In this paper, we look at the prevalence of the health threat trope in media coverage during the United States’ ‘covid-era’, with particular attention to the divergence between right-wing and mainstream media sources in the use of this narrative in coverage of both immigration and covid-19. We examine the generalization of the health threat to immigrants as a group more broadly during this period, with a specific focus on the use of this narrative to demonize Mexican and Latin American refugees, asylees, and immigrants. This study utilizes Entman’s (2003) original cascade model to unpack ways in which mainstream and right-wing media have portrayed immigrant communities in stories about covid-19. Our analysis of news frames compares mainstream news text from print media and cable news (FOX, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times) with right-wing alternative media sources (One America News Network and The Blaze) to determine the prevalence of the health threat frame. Drawing on the extant research on media and public opinion, we argue that news sources shape both the perception of the covid-19 virus, as well as the portrayal of immigrant populations, and thus have long-term implications for immigration policy in the United States.

Authors

• Benjamin Fontaine Gonzalez O'Brien, San Diego State University

• Justin Reedy, University of Oklahoma

• Elizabeth Hampton Hurst, University of Oklahoma