Emily Farris and Heather Silber Mohamed’s new article explores whether the majority of news stories show photos that depict U.S. immigrants negatively. To do so, they created and analyzed a database of immigration images from three national news magazines — Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report.
Nearly every major media outlet last week ran the image of a small girl wailing as she watched her mother patted down by a faceless Border Patrol agent. The gripping photo of the 2-year-old Honduran asylum seeker quickly became a viral symbol of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy that separated children from their parents. Even Trump acknowledged that the images were “bad for us.”
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Our recent research shows that U.S. media often show immigrants the way that the Trump administration sees them: as males in detention facilities and in Border Patrol’s custody. That influences Americans’ attitudes toward those migrants. The current emphasis on showing children has offered a sympathetic portrayal of immigrant families that may be less common, according to our data.