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Examining the Link Between Issue Attitudes and News Source: The Case of Latinos and Immigration Reform

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Abstract

This paper explores whether an individual’s news source can explain their attitudes on immigration. We focus on the Spanish-speaking population in the U.S., since they have the option of accessing their news in English, Spanish or in both languages. Our audience influence hypothesis predicts that Spanish-language news will cover immigration in a more positive and informative manner than will English-language news. Thus, Latinos who use Spanish-language news may have a higher likelihood of possessing pro-immigrant sentiments than Latinos who only use English-language news. Content analysis of Spanish and English-language television news segments reveals variations in the tone and substance of these news outlets. Analysis of Latino survey respondents indicates that immigration attitudes vary by news source. Generational status also influences Latinos’ immigration attitudes, though its impact is not as great as one’s news source.

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Notes

  1. Note that for many Latinos, this is not necessarily a choice, given that the foreign-born population may not be proficient enough in English to use English news sources, while second and third generation Latinos may only speak English.

  2. This phenomenon becomes even more of an issue when we consider that Latinos will comprise 25% of the U.S. population by 2020.

  3. The survey data we use, from the Pew Latino Center, was collected a month after Bush announced his proposal in 2004.

  4. Refer to “Network Brownout Report 2005: The Portrayal of Latinos and Latino Issues on Network Television News, 2004 with a retrospect to 1995.” http://www.nahj.org/resources/networkbrownoutreports/brownoutreports.shtml.

  5. This is not to discount that Spanish-language news may also follow the “crime news script”, but just not on the issue of immigration.

  6. We have no available data to determine whether this is the same demographic group for the Spanish-language viewing audience.

  7. Relatedly, Branton and Dunaway (forthcoming) find that English language newspapers are more likely to offer negatively slanted coverage of immigration relative to Spanish language newspapers.

  8. The survey is available at:http://www.nahj.org/nahjnews/articles/2004/august/spanish-languagesurvey080704.shtml.

  9. http://www.nielsenmedia.com/ethnicmeasure/Latino-american/hispprimetime05.htm.

  10. http://www.nielsenmedia.com/ethnicmeasure/Latino-american/.

  11. This database was accessed using lexis-nexis.com. We searched for the terms “immigration”, “proposal” and/or “reform”.

  12. The following are the local media markets covered: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, Boston, MA (Manchester, NH), Dallas-Ft. Worth, Washington, DC (Hagerstown, MD), Atlanta, Detroit, Houston, Seattle-Tacoma, Tampa-St. Petersburg (Sarasota), Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, Cleveland-Akron (Canton), Denver, Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto, Orlando-Daytona Beach-Melbourne, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Portland, Indianapolis, San Diego, Hartford & New Haven, Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham (Fayetteville), Nashville, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Columbus, New Orleans, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Buffalo, Albuquerque-Santa Fe, Louisville, Las Vegas, Austin, Tulsa, Lexington, KY. The length of each news segment transcript ranged from 1- 835 words, with transcripts having only 1 word being “teasers” to the actual news broadcast.

  13. More descriptive statistics are available from the authors.

  14. Refer to the appendix for the code book.

  15. We decided to code for the tone of the news segment, as opposed to whether the story discusses crime, since we do not expect Spanish-language news to cover this proposal from a criminal standpoint, based on the theoretical argument.

  16. The sampling error was ±3.42 percent and the survey was performed by International Communications Research (ICR), Media, PA. The name of this survey “Changing Channels and Crisscrossing Cultures: A Survey of Latinos on the News Media.” Access to the survey is available from http://www.pewshipanic.org.

  17. Newton (1992) discusses a similar concern for newspaper use and voting in the 1983 and 1987 British elections.

  18. Refer to the appendix for the model specification. The endogenous switching model is from the Stata program \({\tt gllamm}\) (generalized linear latent and mixed models) (RabeHesketh 2004). In brief, \({\tt gllamm}\) can perform maximum-likelihood estimations for simultaneous equations with endogenous covariates. We use the ‘wrapper’ program, ssm, within the \({\tt gllamm}\) package. Miranda and Rabe-Hesketh (2005) provide a detailed explanation of this program.

  19. For instance, the ρ between awareness of the proposal and language spoken at home is −0.15, and −.07 between awareness and language spoken at work.

  20. The survey also asked respondents: “what do you think of a guest worker proposal?’, with the responses being favor or oppose. However, because the question wording was ambiguous, we decided not to use this question.

  21. We do not control for an individual’s awareness of the Bush’s proposal since a Latino’s immigration attitudes should be relatively independent of their knowledge of the latest immigration proposal being debated in Congress. This is particularly the case with respect to their attitudes towards the impact of illegal immigration on the U.S. economy.

  22. Ideally, we would have controlled for the number of times that a respondent could have been potentially exposed to a news segment discussing the immigration proposal, however we did not have the respondent’s media market information. Thus, matching the survey respondents to the content analysis data was not possible.

  23. These differences are statistically significant at the p = .01 level.

  24. We only examine these three categories (Spanish, English, or both) since only 2.4% of respondents use all three news sources.

  25. The first stage estimates are available in the appendix. We also estimated probit models for the three dependent variables of interest on respondents who only spoke English, respondents who only spoke Spanish, and bilingual respondents. Respondents were classified in these groups based on their ability to read and converse in Spanish. For example, respondents who could not speak or read in Spanish very well were categorized as English speakers. The results indicate that Latinos who only watch Spanish language news are significantly more likely to be aware of Bush’s immigration proposal, support a guest worker program that provides immigrants with legal status, and are more likely to believe that illegal immigration helps our economy. These results are consistent with the results found using the simultaneous equation models. The model looking at English-speaking respondents could not be estimated, since all English-speaking respondents did not use Spanish-language news as their preferred source for news. The results for the bilingual respondents indicate that for Latinos who use Spanish-language news, they are significantly more likely to be aware of Bush’s immigration proposal and believe that illegal immigration helps the U.S. economy than Latinos who use English-language news. These estimates are available from the authors.

  26. First difference estimates are also estimated when a respondent shifts from being a first to a third generation respondent. They are available from the authors.

  27. While we would have used a package such as CLARIFY to compute the standard errors of the predicted probabilities, the endogenous switching model is not supported by CLARIFY. However, because the coefficients on the variables of interest (generational status and news source) from which we estimate the predicted probabilities are statistically significant at the p < .01 level, this provides us with enough assurance to expect these predicted probability estimates to also be significant at the standard levels.

  28. The correlation between news source and generational status is −.53 for respondents who use Spanish-language news and .59 for those who use English-language news.

  29. For one example, refer to “Immigration Reform Take 2: Learning the lessons of last year’s debacle”, Editorial, Washington Post, B06, March 4, 2007.

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Acknowledgements

Abrajano would like to thank Zoltan Hajnal, Sam Kernell, Jonathan Nagler, and participants of the Politics of Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity Colloquium (PRIEC), UC Irvine, October 2006, and the UC Riverside American Politics seminar, November 2006, for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Marisa Abrajano

  2. Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Simran Singh

Authors
  1. Marisa Abrajano
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Correspondence to Marisa Abrajano.

Appendix

Appendix

Coding the News Segments

The authors performed the coding of the news segments and each coded 50% of the sample. Intercoder reliability was calculated using Cohen’s κ test statistic; it has a scale that ranges from 0 to 1, with 1 indicating perfect reliability and 0 indicating almost no agreement (Stemler 2001). This measure accounts for the likelihood that agreements between coders can occur intentionally as well as by chance. One of the authors coded 10% of the sample that he/she did not code in order to calculate the κ score; this is considered to be standard practice to determine reliability (Stemler 2001). The equation used to calculate Cohen’s κ test statistic is presented below:

$$ \kappa=\frac{P_{a}-P_{c}}{1-P_{c}} $$
(1)

where:

  • P a is the proportion of stories where there is agreement between the coders

  • P c is the proportion of stories where there is agreement by chance

For our data, κ = .65; Landis and Koch (1977, p.165) develop a scale to interpret this test statistic, with 0.0–0.20 indicating slight agreement, 0.21–0.40 indicating fair agreement, 0.41–0.60 signifying moderate agreement, 0.61–0.80 substantial agreement and 0.81–1.00 almost perfect agreement. Thus, our κ test statistic of 0.65 indicates that the strength of agreement is substantial. This gives us confidence in the reliability of the data and the coding scheme employed for this research.

Questions Used

  1. (1)

    Does the news segment adopt an anti-, neutral, or pro-immigration tone towards immigration? An anti-immigration tone is defined as a news segment in which either the journalist or an individual interviewed or quoted in the segment discusses immigration in a detrimental way (e.g. “the proposed reform would take away jobs from U.S. citizens and rewards those who break the law.”) A neutral position is defined as a news segment which only discusses the provisions and details of the proposed immigration reform (for either Bush, the Democrats or both), but does not incorporate any opinions. This type of news segment is factual, and provides no opinions either from the journalist or from any individuals being interviewed. A pro-immigration tone is defined as a news segment in which either the journalist or an individual interviewed or quoted in the segment discusses the immigration proposal as a benefit to individuals and/or to U.S. society, e.g. this proposal is a humane approach that would help immigrants from hiding and living in fear of the U.S. government. (This question captures the overall tone of the news segment).

  2. (2)

    The news segment mentions: (1) only Bush’s proposal; (2) only the Democrat proposal; (3) neither proposals; 4) both proposals. (This question captures the extent to which the news segment informed viewers of the different versions of the proposal.)

  3. (3)

    Does the news segment mention that the immigration reforms are politically motivated, meaning that the only reason Bush proposed the reform was to win the vote of the Latino electorate? For instance, “Bush and the Republicans are trying to win over Hispanic voters” or “Democrats criticize the proposed immigration reforms as political moves.” (This question captures instances where the motivation for immigration reform was linked to political efforts by politicians to gain the political support of Latinos.)

Table A1 First stage estimates: simultaneous equations models
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Table A2 Descriptive statistics
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Abrajano, M., Singh, S. Examining the Link Between Issue Attitudes and News Source: The Case of Latinos and Immigration Reform. Polit Behav 31, 1–30 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-008-9067-8

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