An intercultural exploration of journalistic framing of immigration in the Mexican Press and United States press

Since the mid-1990s, immigration through and from Mexico to the U.S. has increased. This has led to a good deal of controversy on the issue for all sectors of life, and is immediately apparent in newspaper reporting. In 2006, with proposed changes to federal immigration policy on the legislative table, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people took to the streets and protested these changes. For this study, a sample of 1028 newspaper articles dealing with immigrants and immigration was taken from both U.S. and Mexican newspapers between October, 2005 and September, 2006. The articles were analyzed for journalistic frame, tone, attitude toward immigrants and immigration, objectivity, and number and types of news sources used by the journalists. Several differences between U.S. and Mexican journalists’ coverage of the protests emerged, and were considered as part of the larger context of a year’s worth of reporting.