News consumption and immigration attitudes: new article published in JEMS

The Illiberal Turn team is happy to announce that we have published yet another paper, this time in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, titled News consumption and immigration attitudes: a mixed methods approach.

The paper adopts a mixed-methods approach to audiences of immigration news, combined with a comparative design and a focus on Eastern Europe, bringing significant advances to knowledge in this area, leading to a more rounded understanding of how media come to shape immigration attitudes. We draw on representative population surveys, an expert survey, and qualitative interviews conducted in four Eastern European countries.

In contrast to existing research on Western Europe, we found significant variation in the links between attitudes to immigration and use of Public Service Media (PSM), with PSM consumption linked with more negative attitudes to immigration in some countries, and with more positive attitudes in others. Second, our results confirm that different attitudes to immigration are embedded in different qualitative understandings of immigration: while participants with more positive attitudes often adopted a more inclusive understanding of immigration, those with more negative attitudes adopted a narrower understanding. Third, we demonstrated the importance of family and acquaintances as trusted sources of information.