Shaping Immigration News
A French-American Comparison

This book compares French and US news coverage of immigration from the 1970s to the 2000s.

Rodney Benson (Author)

9780521887670, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 August 2013

296 pages, 22 b/w illus. 22 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.61 kg

'Benson presents a compelling comparison between the format and frames used in television news coverage and newspaper coverage … Benson makes a strong case for the indispensability of the field framework for assessing journalistic, and for that matter all, cultural production.' Christine V. Wood, Social Forces

This book offers a comprehensive portrait of French and American journalists in action as they grapple with how to report and comment on one of the most important issues of our era. Drawing on interviews with leading journalists and analyses of an extensive sample of newspaper and television coverage since the early 1970s, Rodney Benson shows how the immigration debate has become increasingly focused on the dramatic, emotion-laden frames of humanitarianism and public order. In both countries, less commercialized media tend to offer the most in-depth, multi-perspective and critical news. Benson challenges classic liberalism's assumptions about state intervention's chilling effects on the press, suggests costs as well as benefits to the current vogue in personalized narrative news, and calls attention to journalistic practices that can help empower civil society. This book offers new theories and methods for sociologists and media scholars and fresh insights for journalists, policy makers and concerned citizens.

1. Introduction: why study immigration news?
2. The French and US journalistic fields: position, logic, and structure
3. Narrating the immigrant experience in the US media: from jobs threat to humanitarian suffering
4. Organizing the immigration debate in the French media: giving voice to civil society and strategizing against Le Pen
5. Explaining continuity and change in French and US immigration news
6. What makes the press more multiperspectival?
7. What makes for a critical press?
8. Does the medium matter? Television news about immigration
9. Conclusion: the forces of fields and the forms of news.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB]