U.S. & U.K. Media Portrayal of Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Our study, conducted in the “Media and Minorities” 2018 J-term class, utilizes lexical sentiment analysis, basic python coding, and Stata to evaluate U.S. and U.K. media portrayal of refugees and asylum seekers from... [ view full abstract ]

Our study, conducted in the “Media and Minorities” 2018 J-term class, utilizes lexical sentiment analysis, basic python coding, and Stata to evaluate U.S. and U.K. media portrayal of refugees and asylum seekers from 2007-2017. We worked with 51,155 articles in total, drawn from three prominent U.S. newspapers – The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today – and three prominent U.K. newspapers – the Guardian, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Telegraph. Our project sought to determine which factors drive (relative) positivity and negativity in media coverage of this vulnerable group; is it the framing employed by journalists to describe them? The nationality/race of refugees? Gender? We also performed a chronological analysis of coverage to see if it has changed significantly overtime (specifically, before/after the Syrian Civil War in 2011 and the Syrian Refugee crisis in 2015).