Slide 1:

In this research, I am examining the news coverage in Districts one and four of Maryland, and I am comparing them. I am doing so to examine the effect of race on media coverage of immigration. The racial make-up of the two districts are very different, the first district is a primarily white district, with a very low Hispanic and immigrant population. Whereas the fourth district is a primarily black district with a medium sized Hispanic and immigrant population. I predict that district 4 will have more media coverage because of it higher immigrant population due to Dunway et al. And using Abrajano and Hajnal’s scholarly work that states whites feel threatened by Hispanics and therefore they are seen as negatively on news outlets, I believe that this district 4 will also have a more positive outlook on immigration in their news sources. However, I am unsure as to how a high black population in district 4 will nuance all of these predictions as the only literature comes from McDermott 2013 and states that Blacks and Hispanics compete economically.

Slide 2:

For my methods, I basically went to two different news sources. The first being the Capital Gazette, a newspaper that writes in Annapolis. This is on the edge of district 1, however is the only big news source in the district. The second is The Sentinel, which is a prominent news source in PG County. PG county is for the most part in district 4 of Maryland. I then used a key word search using the terms: Immigrant, Immigration, Wall, Border, Government Shutdown, and Security in order to find articles having to do with immigration and immigration policy. I then specified the dates from 12/1/18 – 1/31/19. I then examined the articles to make sure that they had to do with immigration and I separated these articles into three categories. Positive, Neutral, and Negative. Positive – Showed sympathy for immigrants, harshly criticized anti-immigrant sentiments, and/or was supportive of permissive immigration policies. Neutral – No specific attitudes, article was generally unbiased. Negative – Presented immigrants as a threat or in a negative light, supportive of restrictive policies, and/or had anti-immigrant sentiments. This was the hardest part of the data compiling process. I used the titles of the article and the main arguments to categorize them.

Slide 3:

The results were two-fold and pretty simple. First, The Capital Gazette search returned 57 different articles, while the Sentinel returned only 32 different articles. This is almost twice as many articles. The second part of the results showed that while both sources showed about a 50% rate of the articles having a neutral tone, 12% more of the articles done by The Sentinel had a positive tone in regard to immigration and immigration policy. And 10% more of the articles done by the Capital Gazette had a negative outlook on immigration and immigration policy.

Slide 4:

The frequency of the articles is interesting, although places with more immigrants and a higher Hispanic population would tend to have more articles on immigration and immigrants, this is not the case here. There are a few potential reasons for this. Perhaps, it is because the Gazette is a slightly more prominent newspaper. It could also be because there is less than 20% Hispanic population in both districts, so maybe because the immigrant population is not significant, neither news source is writing many articles on the topic. Finally, because blacks and Hispanics compete economically, it could be the fact that immigration policy is not important or interesting to a community that is majority black to read, therefore the news sources in areas like this do not write about them as often. This would be an interesting hypothesis to test further.

The Tone of the media coverage held to be consistent with my prediction. Although The Sentinel did not have as many articles as the Gazette, it was much more sympathetic to the immigrant population and the policy regarding immigration. This stays in line with Abrajano and Hajnal’s literature in 2015.

Finally, the limitations of my work were as such. Because the news sources don’t necessarily represent a specific congressional district, more or less a town or city, it is hard to pin point these results as causal. Basically, these newspapers maybe only appeal to a certain area of that district. Also 57 results were probably enough for the Gazette, however 32 was not as many as I would have liked to come up for the Sentinel. Also, there are other factors that I was unable to control for such as socio-economic status. Although the districts are not too far apart, they are not the exact same.

Assignment 2

Slide 1

Maryland was redistricted in 2012 after the census. There is a case being heard by the supreme court on whether the redistricting was gerrymandering or not. However, district 4 was changed, therefore the population changed a bit with this redistricting adding more white and Hispanic population and decreasing the black population. However, since 2012 none of the populations have changed very much we see a bit of increase in the white and Hispanic population, but a bit of decrease in the immigrant and black population.

Slide 2

It seems as if most of the readings look to prove ways that media and interaction between immigrants and non-immigrants creates and anti-immigration sentiment in America. I use many of these sources to show examples of how this happens. Such as negative media coverage, the president’s policies, and people seeing immigrants as competition.

Slide 3

Because my area is a black domination population, I thought the most interesting thing is that the low-income blacks would feel more hatred to the immigrant population due to economic competition. I think this may be why the democratic representative has such neutral views on immigration policy. Other than that, I predicted that the news sources would create an anti-immigration policy as they often do and that because the population was not increasing the effect of these anti-immigration sentiments would maybe not be as strong.

Slide 4

My research proposal would be a survey sent out to people in the district to find out if low income blacks economic competition with the immigrant population would have an effect on how the black population felt on immigration policy, I would of course have to compare this with the high-income blacks from the district as well. And the other races.