Slide 1: I chose two prominent sources of local news in GA-1 with similar levels of salience of immigration news. I measured this salience by calculating the percentage of news articles within the Dec. 11, 2018 – Jan. 31, 2019 time period were pertaining to immigration, the border wall, and the government shutdown. This indicates that both Savannah Morning News and Brunswick News cover immigration news a similar amount; they pay comparable amounts of attention and efforts to immigration coverage. I chose to analyze 40 articles because Savannah News had hundreds of articles related to immigration, the wall, and the shutdown while Brunswick only had around 70. I wanted to analyze the same number of articles for both sources to give equal attention to each source and so I randomly selected 80 articles total because I believe this was a manageable number given my timeframe and resources of the assignment. I classified the tone of articles as either positive, negative, or neutral. A positively toned article was relatively pro-immigrant by satisfying the coding rules given on the slide, a negative article was anti-immigrant, and a neutral article was neither and did not take a clear stance. An article advocated for or against the border wall by explicitly classifying the wall as beneficial or not for the county. An article was critical of Republicans or Democrats by explicitly challenging the actions of one party and not the other. I then classified articles as either focusing on immigrants as criminals, on the issue of the border wall as a matter of security, on humanizing immigrants as individuals and families, on the partisanship around the shutdown, or on local impact of the shutdown in Savannah-area or Brunswick-area.

 

Slide 2: On this slide I’ve included information about Chatham and Glynn counties, the counties that Savannah Morning News and Brunswick News are distributed in, respectively. I wanted to highlight the statistical differences between the readerships; Chatham county has a much smaller percentage of whites and although both counties have similar percentages of Latinos, Chatham’s total population is much larger and therefore its Latino population is larger. The counties also voted very differently in two recent, significant elections. Chatham has strongly supported the Democratic party with Lisa Ring winning by 16 points in the 2018 congressional election for House representative and Clinton winning by 14.5 points in the 2016 presidential election. Meanwhile, Glynn county has been firmly Republican with Carter winning by 29 points and Trump winning by 28.6 points. These statistics indicate differing political views between the two counties, influencing my predictions about how their news sources may cover and present news about immigrants which I support with literature and research. I predicted that the focus of most articles would be on partisanship because of Wong’s theories of the hyperpartisanship surrounding immigration in recent years. Because immigration is such a politically divisive issue, its news coverage will most likely be centered around the opposing actions, policies, and views of Democrats and Republicans.

 

Slide 3: On this slide, I present the results of my analyses, during which I used the methods described on slide 1. My coding rules held up well as I was able to accurately classify each of the 80 articles, allowing me to gather relatively clear and unambiguous data. The results indicate significant differences in tone and focus between Savannah Morning News and Brunswick News. Both sources had similar percentages of neutral articles, but for the most part, their articles ranged between having negative or positive tones, taking stances either for or against Latino immigrants. The focuses of the articles ranged, but the focus that had the largest percentages for both sources was partisanship. Even though Savannah and Brunswick News varied widely in their frequency of articles with family and local impact focuses, they both had a similar percentage of articles relating to partisanship.

 

 

 

Slide 4: The results from the analyses confirmed my hypotheses: Brunswick News articles had more negative tones than Savannah Morning News and both majority of both sources’ articles had partisanship focuses. The results also indicated that the more positively toned Savannah News had many articles focused on Family while the more negatively toned Brunswick News had many articles focused on Local Impact. It is logical to assume that a news source with pro-immigrant attitudes and views would depict them as individuals and attempt to humanize and evoke empathy by providing personal stories, names, and faces of Latino immigrants. I can only infer that Brunswick News write articles more focused on local impact because as a news source with anti-immigrant perceptions, it may want to reflect its readership’s more positive outlook on and support of American citizens and community residents that are non-threatening compared to outsiders and Latino immigrants.