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Slide 1:

News sources will display their bias in two different ways: agenda setting and framing. Agenda setting means that news sources will give some problems more attention than others, and framing means that a story will be reported on in a biased way, through stereotyping/group imagery and tone of the coverage (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015). In this media analysis, I compared the news coverage of the Brooklyn Eagle, a corporately owned, local news source for Brooklyn, against New York Daily News, a corporately owned, national news source based in New York City. My hypothesis is that, while both news sources will to some extent stereotype immigrants (as they are both corporately owned), since the Brooklyn Eagle is a local news source, there will be more articles focused on issues prevalent to the local population, and the articles as a whole will strike a less negative tone when talking about immigrants. I believe this will be the case because, according to existing research, the media’s reporting of immigration (or any other subject) is based largely off of how well the news can sell. The first part of my hypothesis is based off of the fact that both news sources are corporately owned: according to Branton and Dunaway, “corporately owned organizations are expected to produce more stories focusing on Latino immigration, illegal immigration, and the negative aspects of immigration than privately owned media organizations.” This is probably due to the fact that corporately owned organizations are reliant on public ownership and therefore public opinion, whereas privately-owned organizations have more leeway in their article topics. For national news sources, however, this bias becomes even more apparent. Even with news sources that lean liberal (for example, Abrajano and Hajnal look at The New York Times), national news sources will often resort to using certain stereotypical, well-known themes, like suggesting that all immigrants are Latinos, or using “crime news scripts” with nonwhites (Abrajano & Singh 2009). There are several other ways the Brooklyn Eagle and the New York Daily News will differ. First, there will be differences due to the huge demographic differences between Brooklyn and the United States: while Brooklyn is majority nonwhite (~49.5% white), the United States is major white (76.6% white). Brooklyn also has large immigrant enclaves: in my district, for example, there is a large immigrant Afro-Caribbean population. I would therefore expect 1) less stereotypical “threat narratives” or “crime narratives,” because using them would alienate the local immigrant readership and 2) less focus on Latinos and more focus on other groups of immigrants in order to relate more with the local immigrant readership. Finally, since local news is aimed towards a much smaller group of people, the news will be more focused on the effects of immigration policies on their own district/region. National news outlets, on the other hand, have to find universal ways to relate to the audience they are trying to reach. National news will therefore be more focused on topics like federal politics or the overall situation of immigration at the border.

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Slide 2:

First, I used the key terms “immigrant,” “immigration,” “border,” “wall,” “shutdown,” and “security” to look up articles about immigration. I then went through each article and filtered through them to see how related to immigration the article was: I labeled the articles “tangentially” related to immigration (i.e. only mentioned the word “immigrant” or “immigration,” but the subject of the article was on something else completely), or “directly” related to immigration (i.e. the subject of the article was immigration). The “tangential” category was interesting to me, because it demonstrated that the newswriters were simply using “immigration” or “immigrant” as a buzzword within their articles because they thought it was a hot topic (i.e. the word “immigration” was often used without any elaboration). I ultimately eliminated the “tangential” articles from the rest of my study, however, because they weren’t very useful. Going through the “directly” related articles, I came up with a list of five key questions, and I will explain the reasoning behind each question:

• What is the focus of the article?: The focus of the article is related to the “agenda-setting” part of news coverage. What the news source decides to focus on is largely related to what the media source already expects its audience to think about immigration. I broadly separated articles into 7 categories: NYC-based policy (I expect local news sources to report more on this), court cases, crimes (the prevalence of this especially would demonstrate anti-immigrant bias), border security, humanitarian issues, personal immigrant stories, protests, and commentaries on the Trump administration.

• What is the race/ethnicity of the immigrant(s) mentioned? (i.e. country of origin, Latinx, etc.): Americans tend to associate immigration strongly with Latinx immigration (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015). By looking at the prevalence of Latinx immigrants mentioned, we can see whether the news source is feeding into this narrative. This is also another form of agenda-setting.

• Are the immigrants mentioned legal or undocumented?: Similar to the above, Americans tend to associate immigrants (specifically Latinx immigrants) with undocumented immigrants (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015). If the news source chooses to report mostly on undocumented immigrants, this is also another form of agenda-setting.

• How many coded words? The coded words I looked for were: “chain migration”; “illegal” (or any form of the word, like “illegally”); “anchor”; “[insert color here] America”; words related to crime (i.e. criminal, drugs, etc.): Through these coded words, one can ascertain the general tone of the article. One of the easiest ways to determine whether the news article is biased is to see whether they use the word “illegal” versus “undocumented.” I was very cognizant about this throughout my analysis.

Additionally, there was an article in the Brooklyn Eagle and the New York Daily News that covered the same event: the passage of the Peralta Bill that helped DREAMers acquire state aid for higher education. I was directly able to compare these two news sources to see if either the Brooklyn Eagle or New York Daily News had any differences in focus or tone in their reporting. Finally, just for fun, I filtered through all the articles about the shutdown to see how many talked about immigration.

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Slide 3:

I ended up pulling 5 articles from the Brooklyn Eagle (because in this period of time, there were only 5 that mentioned immigration) and 40 articles from New York Daily News. Due to the different number of articles, in order to better compare the two news sources, I used percentages instead of count. For example, when I was measuring documentation, I found the percentage of how many immigrants were undocumented out of the immigrants mentioned across the articles. Using the aforementioned tests, therefore, I acquired the following findings: first, the Brooklyn Eagle as a whole mentioned immigration less. Less than 1% of the articles published during the shutdown were related to immigration. Indeed, none of the actual articles about the shutdown (i.e. when I searched up “shutdown”) were related to immigration at all: they all instead had to do with the problems that members of the district were facing due to the shutdown. On the other hand, New York Daily News published about 4% of its articles about immigration. Indeed, out of the articles about the shutdown, about 40% mentioned immigration at least tangentially (I ultimately eliminated these articles when I tested my four questions). Second, the focus of the articles was different. The Brooklyn Eagle published most (60%) of its immigration-related articles on local, NYC policies, whereas New York Daily News published about 28% of its articles on humanitarian issues (focused on ICE and border problems), followed by 16% commenting directly at Trump, and 12.5% for personal immigrant stories (i.e. following an individual immigrant’s journey) and crime cases. The prevalence of these crime cases was largely correlated to the number of “coded words.” About 40% of the New York Daily News articles used “coded words,” whereas 0% of the Brooklyn Eagle articles used them. Every single one of the crime case articles used the word “illegal” to describe the undocumented immigrants. Third, both news sources focused a large amount of their coverage on Latino and undocumented immigrants. 66% of the immigrants mentioned in the Brooklyn Eagle were undocumented and 33% were Latino; 85% of the immigrants mentioned in New York Daily News were undocumented and 52% were Latino. It should be noted that around 60% of the immigrants from Brooklyn Eagle were of unknown ethnicity, and 17% were Caribbean-American. Finally, in directly comparing the article about the Peralta DREAM Act against each other, we can see several differences: first, the Brooklyn Eagle spent much more time talking about Peralta himself. This is probably due to the fact Peralta served directly for NY’s State Assembly, but it’s interesting how the article delves into Peralta’s background (as a Dominican-American immigrant) whereas the New York Daily News only mentions him very briefly. I extrapolate that the focus on his Afro-Caribbean background in the Brooklyn Eagle could have pandered towards readers in the large ethnic/immigrant enclaves. Second, the Brooklyn Eagle only focused on the responses of the DREAMers, and therefore the tone was largely positive and pro- the Peralta Bill. On the other hand, New York Daily News spends half the article reporting on conservative viewpoints of the bill, all of which are largely negative.

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Slide 4:

According to my results, my hypothesis was mostly correct. Both news articles did fall into the trap of talking extensively about undocumented and Latinx immigrants, demonstrating sources bias in their reporting. However, the Brooklyn Eagle did report on some Caribbean-Americans, and thus was more representative of Brooklyn’s demographics. This suggests that local media is impacted by the makeup of the population. On the other hand, New York Daily News was not representative of either New York or the United States, suggesting that it relied on the idea of the stereotypical immigrant (i.e. Latinx, undocumented) in order to grab its reader’s attention. In addition, the Brooklyn Eagle focused much more on the local effects of immigration policy (that is to say, it was more focused on how federal immigration policy affected local residents, and it was more focused on local immigration policy), whereas New York Daily News was more focused on emotional or shocking national news (i.e. stories of families being ripped apart at the border, crimes committed by undocumented immigrants). This demonstrates that national news sources tend to be more sensationalized than local news sources. Additionally, while New York Daily News used a significant amount coded words, published immigrant crime stories, and used quotes from anti-immigrant natives, the Brooklyn Eagle did none of this. All this contributed to a more prevalent negative tone about immigrants in New York Daily News that was not apparent in the Brooklyn Eagle, again indicating greater sensationalizing in the national news source. Finally, the comparison between the two articles about the Peralta Bill most clearly reveals the difference in focus and tone between the two news sources. First, the ethnicity of the immigrants mentioned in the two articles is different. The Brooklyn Eagle mentioned Dominican-American and Argentinian-American, while New York Daily News mentioned a Mexican-American. This difference indicates the pandering towards the Caribbean-American audience for the Brooklyn Eagle. New York Daily News, on the other hand, pandered towards a wider audience by stereotyping undocumented immigrants; indeed, it’s especially prevalent that they chose a Mexican-American rather than another ethnicity. Second, the tone in the Brooklyn Eagle is positive (as they only used interviews from DREAMers and supporters of the bill), whereas New York Daily News has a neutral and almost negative tone (as they heavily relied on interviews from conservatives and people who did not support the bill). In all, therefore, the Brooklyn Eagle focused more on news that related to its local population and reported on immigration in a more favorable light. New York Daily News, on the other hand focused on sensational stories and reported on immigration, as a whole, more negatively. Before I conclude, I would like to address some sources of error. First, I understand that five articles is an extremely small sample size; however, local news sources (the Brooklyn Eagle as well as other Brooklyn-specific news sources I looked at) simply did not tend to cover immigration to a large extent. Nevertheless, the fewer articles made it harder to compare the two news sources. Second, I may have improperly sorted through articles. I discarded many articles that only tangentially mentioned immigration; however, I understand that my own bias may have affected this. Third, New York Daily News is also a New York-based source; as such, I’m not sure to what extent it distributes to NYC. I emailed them to ask about this, but I never got a response. Seeing as New York is about 27.5% Latinx, however, if New York Daily News does distribute extensively to NYC, this may partially explain the prevalence of reporting on Latino immigration. Finally, because we were looking at a time period when the border-wall-induced shutdown was happening, the news articles definitely chose to spend more time talking about Latinx and undocumented immigrants at this time; it would be interesting therefore to look at another period of time to see if the things I observed still hold true. To end, if I were to continue my research, besides looking at a different time period, I would want to look more at the crime narratives put forward by the New York Daily News: it was very clear in those articles that the writer was trying to distinguish “bad” immigrants (i.e. the criminals) and “good” immigrants (i.e. the documented cop killed by the undocumented immigrant). It was especially in these articles that the undocumented immigrants were referred to as “illegal” (indeed, these were the only articles in which the undocumented immigrant was called “illegal” every time). In other articles, the author tries to distinguish between bad undocumented immigrants and the majority of good undocumented immigrants. This was very interesting to me: it seems like, for conservative news sources, the split for “good” immigrants is very clear—documented immigrants are “good,” and undocumented immigrants are “bad.” For liberal news sources, this distinction is much more difficult to ascertain, and I would like to look further into this.

Slide 1: New York’s 9^th Congressional District is approximately 33.6% white (non-Hispanic), 46.9% black, and 8.1% Asian. The Latino population is approximately 10% of the population, and the immigration population takes up 39.3% of the population (a third of which is undocumented). The median income is approximately $57,453, which places the majority of the population as either lower class or lower-middle class, and above 10% are unemployed. Before the 2010-2011 redistricting, the district with the most similar borders was District 11 (which District 9’s current congressmember, Yvette D. Clarke, represented). The borders of District 11 in 2009 and District 9 in 2019 are relatively similar, except that District 9 today extends further south to include the neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay, which is majority white. District 11 was 48% black, 24.7% white (non-Hispanic), and 4.5% Asian, as well as 12.9% Hispanic. The immigrant population was approximately 40% of the population. Post-redistricting in 2012, the demographics stood at 30.3% white, 53.3% black, 6% Asian; 10.8% Latino; and 42.6% immigrants. It should be noted that, since 2012, the immigrant population has been decreasing (by about 3.3 percentage points). Several additional features of this population are also important: first, most of the ethnic groups / immigrant groups are concentrated in enclaves. Second, the immigrant and black populations largely overlap because members of NY’s 9^th Congressional District tend to be Caribbean. Finally, the Caribbean immigrant community is well established and has been constantly growing since the early 1900s.

Slide 2: There are mixed opinions on the effect of media coverage on immigration: national news sources tend to portray immigrants in a negative light (Abrajano & Hajnal 2015), but it is difficult to say what part of this is due to local population versus nationwide sentiment. Indeed, Branton and Dunaway suggest that “the size of the foreign-born population is only inconsistently related to negative news coverage of immigration.” However, Abrajano and Singh dispute this with their “audience influence hypothesis”: essentially, since media firms are for-profit, they will consider their economic situation and decide which news their audience “will respond best to. Oftentimes, this results in sensationalized news coverage, and overreporting on issues like immigration. In addition, the media will use certain, easy-to-follow themes like portraying the majority of immigrants as Latinos, or following “crime news scripts,” which portray nonwhite, especially African American actors as criminals (Abrajano & Singh 2009). In addition, Branton and Dunaway themselves suggest that proximity to the US/Mexico border causes more negative coverage, sensationalism, and exploitation of the Latino threat narrative; thus, I extrapolate that populations with more prevalent immigrant issues have more intense and negative local reporting. Public opinion is strongly affected by the media: the media “primes” the audience to respond to immigrants in a certain way, thus fueling negative opinions (Branton and Dunaway 2009). The media does this in two ways: first, through “agenda-setting” (i.e. focusing on immigration a disproportionate amount) and “framing” (i.e. portraying immigration negatively). Negative public opinion, especially from the white population, is also largely shaped by a sudden change in local demographics, like a sudden influx of immigrants (Hopkins); and the race of the immigrants, as whites tend to be less hostile towards Asian Americans and more hostile towards Latinos and blacks (Abrajano & Hanjal 2015). There is also similarly often backlash from black Americans: blacks and low-income men might see immigrants as competitors in jobs (McDermott 2013). As a result, these residents may be less likely to support pro-immigrant policies (i.e. DACA, pathways to citizenship), and more likely to support anti-immigrant policies (i.e. border enforcement). Nevertheless, negative public opinion does not necessarily equate to negative immigrant experiences. Of course, immigrants have negative experiences, which vary between immigrant groups: Asian-Americans, while able to integrate in the sense that they are seen as a “model minority and ally” to whites (Abrajano & Hajnal 2015), can have difficulty penetrating into politics (for example, consider Aptekar’s analysis of Asian Americans in Edison, a community that is successful economically, but not politically); Latinos, on the other hand, are generally treated by white Americans as threats (Abrajano & Hanjal 2015). In addition, it is difficult for immigrants to integrate into local populations: for example, although Caribbean immigrants and African-Americans are of the same “race,” Caribbean Americans tend to form their own communities, instead of integrating into current societies, if black and white racial identities are strong enough (McDermott 2013). At the same time, however, the size of the immigrant population also improves the immigrant population in meaningful ways: more settled immigrants create a better support system for immigrants first arriving to the United States. In addition, the increased size of the immigrant population confers benefits for good policies and representation, as they have become a sizeable voting body. Finally, a district with a strong democratic leaning would also be more partial to supporting permissive and pro-immigrant policies, thus improving immigrant experiences in the district (Wong 2017).

Slide 3: Considering the size of the immigrant population in NY’s 9th Congressional District, I would expect there to be a high salience of media coverage on immigration, since immigration policy is probably pertinent to the large immigrant, and especially undocumented population. In addition, since, in recent years hasn’t been a major or sudden influx of immigrants (indeed, the population of immigrants are decreasing), I’d assume that the media would not have any serious, local situation to capitalize on. negatively Indeed, since there is such a high percentage of nonwhite citizens and such a large immigrant population, local news sources may attempt to pander towards these immigrant populations instead of white citizens. Of course, this also may vary amongst neighborhoods: the immigrant enclaves, for example, may have more pro-immigrant local news; meanwhile, areas like Sheepshead Bay may have more negative local coverage. Generally, however, I expect the news to positive or neutral. The neutrality of the news, combined with the segregation of the immigrant population into enclaves, and the relative lack of “destabilizing change” in the local immigrant population would probably result in a relatively neutral opinion towards immigrants. Furthermore, the fact that 40% of the population is already immigrants (this percent would get higher if we were to count people related to immigrants as well), residents of the district would probably be sympathetic and have positive opinions in regard to new immigrants. However, complicating this is the fact that these immigrants are moving into an area that is already largely lower-income and unemployed, they may be seen as economic competitors against the local population. These negative attitudes may be exacerbated by the size of the local black population. Nevertheless, considering the establishment of the immigrant population, and the fact that the local black population largely intersects with the immigrant population, I believe that, overall, public opinion is positive. I would thus expect support for pro-immigration programs (i.e. DACA, pathways to citizenship). Positive public opinion thus results in a positive immigrant experience. First, considering the enormous size of the immigrant population (consisting of about 40% of the population), I would expect there to be adequate integration (i.e. that local immigrant populations and enclaves would help new immigrants transition into society). Second, because immigrants generate such a large voting bloc in the 9th Congressional District, I would expect good political integration: this means immigrants can elect a congressmember that supports immigration and positive and inclusive immigration policies.

Slide 4: Currently, I am asking someone who lives in the district for suggestions on popular local news sources. From what I have already researched, however, I currently have two fairly district-/borough-specific news sources. First, the Brooklyn Reporter, which has different sections for different neighborhoods; second, the New York Daily News, which is read throughout all of New York City, reports more on national news, but additionally has a Brooklyn section. From these two news sources, I will pull out articles from December 1, 2018 (slightly before the government shutdown) through January 31, 2019 (slightly after the government shutdown). I believe looking at articles around the shutdown is important because it contextualizes why the shutdown happened, and subsequently the opinions on the aftermath of the shutdown. I will primarily be looking at three aspects of news coverage: first, I will count the number of pieces on immigration during this time period and compare it against the number of total articles to see how much focus is placed upon the topic of immigration. Second, of the articles about immigration, I will look at the race and ethnicity of immigrants mentioned. Considering that the majority of immigrants in the 9^th Congressional District are Afro-Caribbean, an overrepresentation of other ethnicities of immigrants in local news would demonstrate that media is focused more on sensationalized/stereotypical reporting rather than representing members of the district. Third, of the articles about immigration, I will note the number of negative “buzzwords” they use. An abbreviated list of these buzzwords include: chain migration, illegal immigrant (vs. undocumented immigrant), anchor baby, [insert color here] America. I may also attempt to imitate Abrajano & Hajnal’s experiment of ranking the tone of the articles (by recruiting a random group of people via a survey), if the buzzword check does not work out. If I have time, I would like to compare the different neighborhoods of the 9^th Congressional District against each other. First, I would look for the demographics of each neighborhood (i.e. I already know that Sheepshead Bay is majority white). Then, I would find articles about immigration published in each of these neighborhoods and run the aforementioned three tests on the news articles. I would then compare the statistics against each other and see whether the demographics of the neighborhoods had any relation with positive/negative news reporting.