Where We Get Our News: Examining County-Level Correlates of the Media Framing of Immigration and Crime

• In Event: Immigration and Crime In Context: Mediators, Moderators, and Outcomes

Abstract

Despite an abundance of empirical evidence that immigrants are less crime-prone than native US citizens and that immigration is unassociated with (or may even reduce) crime at the macro-level, the general public continues to be misaligned with this reality and, instead, sizeable shares of the population believe that immigrants are especially crime-prone and that immigration as a process results in elevated rates of crime. The current study examines one of the possible sources of this disconnect – media framing – with a focus on (a) the geographic distribution of various immigration-crime frames and (b) the structural correlates that account for variation in media framing across different contexts. Specifically, we employ content analysis techniques of newspaper articles from all available regional publications from 2008-2012 that we aggregate and pair with structural covariates gathered from the United States Census. Subsequently, we implement a series of multivariate regression models to analyze the community-level predictors of media framing. Directions for future research and policy implications are discussed.

Authors

• Cody Tuttle, University of Arkansas

• Casey Taggart Harris, University of Arkansas