Tenacity of Routine: The Absence of Geo-Ethnic Storytelling in Constructing Immigration News Coverage

Abstract

In 2006, millions of immigrants protested in cities around the United States against H.R. 4437, a new bill in Congress that threatened to criminalize undocumented immigrants and strengthen border enforcement. For this study, I interviewed immigration editors and reporters at California newspapers about the discourse surrounding this bill to determine the presence and/or prevalence of geo-ethnic storytelling, which posits that racial and geographic location of a particular subject community creates a unique network for the way journalists tell and understand stories. This study suggests that although reporters and editors acknowledge the im-portance of their own sense of race and community in creating reports, the journalistic norms of fairness and objectivity were more influential than geo-ethnic storytelling, suggesting the resilience of news routines and values despite changes in the field and an issue couched in race.

Negotiating the sacred: the lived religion of Eritrean newcomers and their process of integration in the Netherlands

“…This perspective highlights the importance of stories being told by the ones who have experienced them, rather than the stories brought by the dominant group. This is important because, when it comes to narratives on immigration, the voices of the immigrants themselves are often unheard (Grimm 2015).…”

17. Journalism and Geography

“…Today's transnational media system provides opportunities for power to operate through evident social structures that restrict some journalists from access to particular sources and interpretations of information while providing free rein to journalists from nationstates grounded in their positions of elite message construction. Great financial expense of globalized news, which can include travel, lodging, technological and security support, and talent with vast language and cultural skills also contributes to the hegemonic profile of transnational media systems, leading to reductive coverage of issues from various geographies that are interpretations of those spaces and places and related issues that reflect the ideologies of international sources of power and specific voices of power at local levels of interpretation (Archetti 2014;Gasher 2007;Grimm 2015). What remains missing in these elements of transnational media messaging is the complication of interpretations from the middle-level power structures and the low-end power positions in both global and local collectives.…”