In Eunji Kim's “The Immigration Debate . . .Without Immigrants,” she
analyzed television coverage of immigration reform in February on
ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS nightly news programs, CNN's Situation
Room, Fox's Special
Report, and MSNBC's Hardball—54
reports featuring 157 sources. Only three sources (2%) were identified as
current or former undocumented immigrants. The majority of sources
were either politicians (71%) or journalists (21%), not including
hosts or correspondents.
While
55% of immigrants are women, only 19 (12%) of sources were female.
The 2011 mix of immigrants was 53% from Latin America, 29% from Asia,
12% from Europe, and 4% from Africa. Of 150 sources with
identifiable ethnicity, 16% were Latinos, 11% were African-Americans,
and 1% were Asians. The rest were white. But this is misleading, since President Obama
made 12 of the 16 African-American appearances and Senator Marco
Rubio accounted for 14 of 24 Latinos. Without them, the percentages
of Latinos and African-Americans drops to 7% and 3%.
Although
Kim does not try to quantify the topics discussed, she notes that the most
common focus of discussion was border security, in spite of the fact
that only about 20% of our immigrants have crossed the border
illegally. While immigrants' opinions were largely absent, when they
were mentioned, they were “mostly objectified as tools or obstacles
for the U. S. economy or politics.” That is, they were discussed
in terms of either the value of their labor or how they might vote in
the next election.In February, President Obama proposed raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 per hour in the State of the Union address. The same issue contained an analysis of print and television coverage of the minimum wage by Sean Cox and Steve Rendall. (Unfortunately, this one is not available online.) It covered three months (1/1 to 3/24) of articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal, plus the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news programs—32 stories with 87 sources.
I'm
sure you can guess the results. Only 3 of the sources (3%) were low
wage workers, and a fourth was a union official. However, business
owners provided 17 sources (20%) and business associations another 4.
Therefore, businesspeople outnumbered workers by more than 5 to 1.
Politicians and governments officials accounted for 31 sources (36%)
and academics 23 sources (26%).
Of the
87 sources, 74 expressed an opinion on Obama's proposal, with 47%
(64%) favoring the wage hike and 27 (36%) opposed. Obama himself
accounted from 11 of the sources in favor, however, as many of the
stories began by quoting his proposal.
It
might appear that, in spite of the absence of low wage workers, the
stories were slanted to the left. However, the stories tilt less toward increasing the minimum wage than public opinion. The latest Gallup poll shows 71% in favor of increasing the minimum wage and 27%
opposed. More importantly, as Cox and Rendall point out, by
underrepresenting workers, the stories excluded the possibility that
the minimum wage should be raised to more than
$9 per hour. President Obama himself had promised to raise it to
$9.50 in the 2008 campaign. If it had kept pace with inflation since
1968, it would be $10.52. And if it had kept up with the growth of worker productivity, it would be over $16.54. But in the media
frame, the debate was limited to between $7.25 and $9.
In
both of these content analyses, the people who were underrepresented
were those whose lives would be most affected by the legislation.
The public is deprived of the opportunity to see or hear them and
possibly identify with their situation. And of course, it is no
accident that the people who were largely excluded were folks whose
income is substantially lower than those who were overrepresented.
If immigrants and minimum wage workers want their opinions to be
covered, maybe they should learn to march in the streets.
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