Now available Open Access: 📰 Does (immigration) framing influence public opinion? 🧵 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... - ThreadSky

nicolaiberk.bsky.social • 18 days ago

Now available Open Access:

📰 Does (immigration) framing influence public opinion?

🧵

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10584609.2025.2456519#d1e751

Comments

nicolaiberk.bsky.social•18 days ago

Journalists are often assumed to influence public opinion by focusing on certain aspects of political issues and events. While experimental research shows that such emphasis framing affects political attitudes, it is unclear how these findings translate to complex, real-world environments.

nicolaiberk.bsky.social•18 days ago

I focus on a unique case involving the largest German tabloid, Bild. In 2017 the chief editor - who had hosted a refugee family - resigned over allegations of sexual harassment. His successor would severely change the outlet's migration coverage.

nicolaiberk.bsky.social•18 days ago

Analyzing ~2.5 million news articles, I show that this editorial change heavily affected the tabloid’s immigration coverage: Bild increased their attention to crime frames in their migration coverage by 42%, compared to other daily newspapers.

nicolaiberk.bsky.social•18 days ago

Leveraging large-scale panel data from ~15,000 respondents in the excellent German Longitudinal Election Study Panel, I examine whether this stark shift affected readers’ immigration attitudes.

The surprising result: attitudes toward immigration and related variables remained unchanged.

nicolaiberk.bsky.social•18 days ago

I rule out alternative explanations, such as readers abandoning the tabloid after the editorial shift. Instead, I find that immigration attitudes became much less volatile following the 2015 refugee crisis. I argue that these 'crystallized' attitudes are less susceptible to shifts in media framing.

nicolaiberk.bsky.social•18 days ago

Takeaway: news content does not always influence public attitudes. Framing effects appear most impactful during the early formation of opinions.

Full replication materials for these analyses are available on Harvard Dataverse:
https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TL3TKW