AN EXPERIMENT CONDUCTED BY BOCCONI UNIVERSITY'S ANNE MARIE JEANNET AND A COLLEAGUE PROVES THAT EVEN SUBTLE DIFFERENCES IN THE MEDIA'S WORDS AND PHRASING CAN INFLUENCE PERCEPTIONS AND POLICY PREFERENCES

The British media contributes to the perception of Britain’s immigrant population through the portrayal of immigration and might affect people’s attitudes if news outlets shifted their practices to emphasize words and themes that are currently present but not frequent. Anne-Marie Jeannet (Bocconi’s Department of Decision Sciences) and Scott Blinder (University of Massachusetts-Amerhst) find this out in the working paper Numbers and Waves, the Illegal and the Skilled: The Effects of Media Portrayals of Immigration on Public Opinion in Britain.
 
The British press is national in scope and partisan in ideology, with wide-circulation popular tabloids having a strong anti-immigration stance and using hostile frames that depict immigrants as too numerous (numbers frame), flooding Britain (flood frame) or illegal (illegal frame). Less common frames mainly used by broadsheet high-end papers underline the presence of Eastern Europeans (Eastern Europe frame) and highly-skilled workers (skills frame).
 
Jeannet and Blinder designed an experiment to test the impact of the five frames, singled out by a content analysis and largely used in the press in the last two decades. 1,921 people representative of British adults by age, gender, social class and type of newspaper readership were asked to read a series of newspaper headlines and reply to a number of questions. One of the headlines and some of the questions pertained to immigration. While around one sixth of the respondents (the control group) were exposed to a neutral immigration headline, the rest read headlines presenting immigration according to one of the five frames. The replies of the five groups were, then, compared to those of the control group.
 
While the use of the most common frames (numbers, flood and illegal) doesn’t have any significant effect (perhaps because the perused frames have exhausted any possible effect, the authors suggest), hinting at immigrants as Eastern Europeans or highly skilled people results in significant changes.
 
Even though the perception of the magnitude of immigration remains grotesquely exaggerated through all groups (at around 22% of the resident population, it doubles the real data), the perception of its composition is affected. Using the Eastern Europe frame reduces the estimated share of family members in search of reunification, while readers exposed to the skills frame estimate a share of illegal immigrants significantly lower than the control group (15.33% vs. 20.21%) and think that the immigrant population includes a lower share of asylum seekers and more workers.
 
Exposure to the two unusual frames affects also readers’ immigration preferences. Those exposed to the Eastern Europe frame are less likely to ask for a reduction of immigration and those exposed to the skills frame are less likely to ask for forced repatriation.
 
“We know that opinions are hard to change”, Prof. Jeannet says, “but we proved that exposure to news can have perception effects: even subtle differences in words and phrasing matter”.