Framing Migration: Global North vs. South in Media Coverage Through LDA & Sentiment Analysis

• In Event: 30625 - New Frontiers in International Migration

Abstract

How do newspapers conceptualize migration? How do these conceptualizations change over time and across geographical boundaries? This study investigates how newspapers globally report on migration, examining the types of migration mentioned and their variations over time and geography. To do this, I create two datasets: first, a longitudinal dataset of newspaper content spanning five years (2019-2024) from around the world is analyzed, supplemented by the second, a nine-year dataset (2015-2024) of newspaper content from Nepal—an emigration hotspot. The analysis focuses on the framing of migration issues in global media discourse using Latent Dirichlet Allocation for topic modeling and sentiment analysis.

Preliminary findings indicate a significant emphasis on forced displacement and refugees, followed by legal and policy-related news. While general trends are similar, there is notably more focus on refugees and legal and policy-related migration in the Global North compared to the Global South. In 2020, coverage of COVID-19-related migration surged in the Global South relative to the Global North. Furthermore, there has been a slight increase in articles discussing environmental migration in 2023 and 2024 in the Global South compared to the Global North. In the Nepal-specific dataset, there is evidence of an increase in coverage of migration, with articles becoming increasingly positive in recent years.

Next steps involve incorporating more sources from the Global South and expanding the timeline to ten years (2014-2024) to enhance the dataset's comprehensiveness.

Author

• Aryaa Rajouria, University of Washington