New Media on Immigration

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The U.S. media have hindered effective policy-making on immigration for decades, and their impact has been increasing in recent years as a result of an ongoing evolution in the media industry. That was the consensus emerging out of a panel organized by the Brookings Institution to assess democracy in the age of new media on September 25 at the Ronald Reagan Building.

The Institution released a report examining the new media’s role in the U.S. Immigration debate, and exploring how the media conditioned public opinion and the policy landscape.

“Changes in the media landscape, the advent of a 24-hours news cycle, the growing Latino media, and the rise of conservative voices on cable TV news, are increasingly transforming the context of our nation’s political battles, and promoting stalemate on an issue that is inherently difficult to resolve,” said Harvard University’s Marvin Kalb, the discussion’s moderator.

Robert Suro, a non-resident fellow at Brookings, said that deeply ingrained practices within American journalism have produced a narrative that conditions the public to associate immigration with illegality, crisis, controversy and government failure.

Meanwhile, he argued, new voices of advocacy on the media landscape have succeeded in mobilizing segments of the public in opposition to policy initiatives, sometimes by exaggerating the narrative told by traditional news organizations.

“The combined effect is to promote stalemate on an issue that is inherently difficult to resolve and that is likely to resurface on the public agenda when a new administration and a new Congress take office in January 2009,” he said.

And he added: “The presence of more than 12 million unauthorized migrants is prima facie evidence of policy-making that has been haphazard, episodic and ultimately ineffective.”

The 83-page report also claims that anxiety over illegal immigration increased during the Bush presidency much more among conservatives than among liberals or moderates, and that radio and cable TV hosts and bloggers on the right helped boost organizations that promoted an agenda of more enforcement and less immigration.

“While the conservative talkers and bloggers roared, liberal commentators showed little appetite for the subject,” it says.

The Pew Research Center’s Banu Akdenizli said the English-language media tended to focus on the politics of the bill, the winners and the losers in the Senate, while the Spanish-language press focused much more on immigrants themselves and the possible ramifications of the bill within the ethnic community.

E.J. Dionne, Jr., a senior fellow at Brookings, said that while Latinos played an important part in pushing for immigration reform, their impact on the debate may be limited by their relative absence in swing congressional districts.

“Americans are philosophically pro-immigration but operationally in favor of a variety of restrictions,” he said.

Jesse Masai is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.