Immigration is an increasingly important political issue in Western democracies and a crucial question relates to the antecedents of public attitudes towards immigrants. It is generally acknowledged that information relayed through the mass media plays a role in the formation of anti‐immigration attitudes. This study considers whether news coverage of immigrants and immigration issues relates to macro‐level dynamics of anti‐immigration attitudes. It further explores whether this relationship depends on variation in relevant real world contexts. The models simultaneously control for the effects of established contextual explanatory variables. Drawing on German monthly time‐series data and on ARIMA time‐series modeling techniques, it is shown that both the frequency and the tone of coverage of immigrant actors in the news significantly influence dynamics in anti‐immigration attitudes. The strength of the effect of the news, however, depends on contextual variation in immigration levels and the number of asylum seekers. Implications of these findings are discussed in the light of the increasing success of extreme right parties and growing opposition to further European integration.

In contemporary high-choice media environments, the issue of media trust and its impact on people's media use has taken on new importance. At the same time, the extent to which people trust the news media and how much it matters for their use of different types of media is not clear. To lay the groundwork for future research, in this article we offer a focused review of (a) how news media trust has been conceptualized and operationalized in previous research and (b) research on the extent to which news media trust influences media use, and (c) offer a theoretically derived framework for future research on news media trust and its influence on media use.

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This article critically reviews current frame and framing research in media and communication studies. It is first argued that most authors fail to distinguish between ‘frame’ and ‘framing’ and therewith produce a conceptual confusion and imprecision that is not conducive to the field. Second, it is argued that current frame and framing research ignore sociological research about news production and news audiences that reached its zenith in the 1980s and is still conceptually and methodologically relevant to much current frame and framing research. As a result, a notion of power is absent from most current frame and framing research. By discussing — on the basis of key literature — what a news ‘frame’ is, how it comes about and how it is of consequence successively, these claims are substantiated and research directions for improving the field are indicated.

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