Effect of Media News on Radicalization of Attitudes to Immigration

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a growing aversion to immigration worldwide and, at the same time, radicalization of public opinion on the issue. This paper explores the relationship between media news and individual attitudes to immigration. We run an empirical analysis whereby an index capturing individuals’ pro-immigration attitude, measured in 19 countries, is regressed over indexes capturing the coverage and tone of media news about immigration. We find that pro-immigration attitudes are negatively correlated with media coverage and the negative tone of news. However, this correlation is significant only for those with high trust in the media. In the case of low trust, higher coverage of immigration and a negative news slant make previous preferences and beliefs vis-à-vis immigration more extreme, yielding a lower pro-immigration index for those politically on the right, while the opposite applies to those on the left. The pro-immigration index is constructed by means of fuzzy methods to account for the many aspects defining attitudes to immigration.

Public Opinion and Immigration in Europe: Can Regional Migration Flows Predict Public Attitudes to Immigration?

“…We investigate later in the paper whether the inclusion of origin as one of the migrants' distinctive characteristics can shed light on this result. Moreover, media framing has been shown to play a large part in distorting the reality of immigration and negatively biasing attitudes towards immigrants (see for instance Benesch et al, 2019;Schneider-Strawczynski and Valette, 2021;Agovino et al, 2022). In this regard, natives' biased perception could be driving the negative correlation between the arrival of highly educated migrants and negative changes in attitudes.…”

Opinion Market Model: Stemming Far-Right Opinion Spread Using Positive Interventions

“…We would require a pre-test/post-test control group design to achieve true causal links. Previous work (King, Schneer, and White 2017;Guess et al 2021;Agovino, Carillo, and Spagnolo 2021) provides evidence of the interventional role of media coverage. In Section 8, we explore this further in a what-if experiment to demonstrate how the level of media coverage affects opinion market shares.…”