Toril Aalberg

Employing a comparative experimental design drawing on over 18,000 interviews across eleven countries on four continents, this article revisits the discussion about the economic and cultural drivers of attitudes towards immigrants in advanced democracies. Experiments manipulate the occupational status, skin tone and national origin of immigrants in short vignettes. The results are most consistent with a Sociotropic Economic Threat thesis: In all countries, higher-skilled immigrants are preferred to their lower-skilled counterparts at all levels of native socio-economic status (SES). There is little support for the Labor Market Competition hypothesis, since respondents are not more opposed to immigrants in their own SES stratum. While skin tone itself has little effect in any country, immigrants from Muslim-majority countries do elicit significantly lower levels of support, and racial animus remains a powerful force.

The media have a strong tendency to frame political issues with a focus on personal and emotional cases. We do not, however, know if there is a close link between the news media’s use of these frames and the news preferences of the public. Such a close relationship may exist either because human interest news coverage is driven by audience demand or because the public might be influenced by the degree of individual news stories in the news. On the other hand, the audience’s news preferences may be unrelated to the actual media coverage on irregular immigration due to citizens’ selective media exposure, which may be driven by political predispositions. Based on a large quantitative content analysis conducted in the United States, France, and Norway and a following public opinion survey in the same countries, we find that the application of a human interest frame in a country’s news coverage of irregular immigration does not correspond with the public’s preferences for this type of news coverage. On the individual level, our findings demonstrate that liberal audience groups favor human interest–framed news coverage, while conservatives do not agree that individual news stories would provide a better understanding of the issue of irregular immigration.

Has coverage of minorities in the Norwegian press moved from a static biology discourse rooted in racial thinking to a more dynamic discourse based on environmental and cultural factors? Based on a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles from the period 1902-2010, we show that press coverage early in the period frequently refers to biological aspects of minorities, while environmental and cultural factors increase in the later period. References to minorities culture in the final period, however, are among the most static, while early reference to skin complexion, etc., is less static than pure race-based thinking would suggest.

There has been much negative focus on Muslims in public debates in the West and it is a matter of great interest to examine whether Muslims are particularly exposed to prejudice and hostility. Since it is known that immigrants tend to be exposed to prejudice, and practically all Muslims living in Western countries are either immigrants or are of immigrant origin, it is useful to analyse whether Muslims are viewed more negatively than immigrants in general. Using data from survey experiments conducted in Norway, Sweden, the USA and the United Kingdom in 2009, we find that Muslim immigrants were not more negatively viewed than immigrants in general. In the two countries that have experienced large-scale attacks by Islamic extremists, the USA and the United Kingdom, the expressed levels of anti-Muslim attitudes were actually lower than the levels of general anti-immigrant attitudes. We find that individual traits that influence general xenophobia also influence anti-Muslim attitudes.

It was previously perceived as a citizen’s responsibility to follow the news and to keep oneself informed about politics and current affairs. Recently, however, it appears as though a growing number of citizens ignore the information opportunities given to them. Changes in the media environment have given people cross-nationally more of a choice regarding the media diet they prefer. For the American case, Prior has demonstrated that in an era of cable TV and Internet, people more readily remove themselves from political knowledge and political action than previously. In this article, we study how the public’s consumption of news versus entertainment has developed over the last decade in countries with significantly different media systems. Is there a general increase in preference for entertainment across Europe, and has the gap between news- and entertainment-seekers increased such as documented by Prior for the U.S. case? Who are the European citizens who remove themselves from news and current affairs in the environment of increased choice? Based on data from five waves of the European Social Survey covering more than thirty European countries from 2002 to 2010, we demonstrate how national context or the media environment moderates the influence of individual-level factors in news consumption.

This article investigates the volume of foreign news provided by public service and commercial TV channels in countries with different media systems, and how this corresponds to the public's interest in and knowledge of foreign affairs. We use content analyses of television newscasts and public opinion surveys in 11 countries across five continents to provide new insight into the supply and demand for international television news. We find that (1) more market-oriented media systems and broadcasters are less devoted to international news, and (2) the international news offered by these commercial broadcasters more often focuses on soft rather than hard news. Furthermore, our results suggest that the foreign news offered by the main TV channels is quite limited in scope, and mainly driven by a combination of national interest and geographic proximity. In sum, our study demonstrates some limitations of foreign news coverage, but results also point to its importance: there is a positive relationship between the amount of hard international news coverage and citizens' level of foreign affairs knowledge.

As news media change, so media news consumption changes with them. This paper, part of a larger international research project involving 11 countries in four continents (Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia), is focused on news consumption. As the range of media outlets has increased dramatically in recent years, this paper asks which news sources are people regularly watching, listening to or reading to understand what is happening in the world. Moreover, the paper tries to detect whether television news remains at the top of the news hierarchy, seeking to identify differences in news consumption in different countries with different media cultures and, consequently, different media behaviour, as well as to reveal differences in news media uses between older and younger generations.

I de siste tiårene har mediene blitt hovedscenen for politisk informasjon og debatt. Det har funnet sted en markant økning i antall mediekanaler, nyhetssendinger og artikler om politikk. Men hvor forståelig er egentlig de politiske nyhetene for publikum og velgere? I denne artikkelen argumenterer vi for at journalister benytter en teknikk som favoriserer de mest kunnskapsrike når de dekker valgkamper og andre politiske forhold. Ved å bruke en kvantitativ innholdsanalyse av to nasjonale aviser og to nasjonale nyhetsprogrammer på TV undersøker vi nyhetsdekningen under valgkampen som ledet frem til stortingsvalget i 2009. Formålet med studien er å undersøke hvor mye forkunnskaper publikum og velgere trenger for å forstå den politiske nyhetsdekningen. Vi finner at en betydelig andel av nyhetsdekningen blir presentert på en slik måte at den kan virke ekskluderende på de som har lite kunnskap om politikk fra før. Denne presentasjonen er delvis resultatet av en omfattende bruk av ekspertkilder, men skyldes også journalistenes egen oppfatning av hvilken forkunnskap publikum innehar. Over recent decades, the media have established their position as the main scene of political information and debate. With an increasing number of media channels, news about politics has become more readily available for most people, but how comprehensible is political news for the electorate? In this article, we argue that journalists use a technique for covering elections and political matters that favours the more knowledgeable of voters. Using quantitative content analysis of two national newspapers and two national TV news programmes, we investigate news coverage during the campaign leading up to the Norwegian parliamentary election in 2009. Our purpose is to uncover how much previous political knowledge voters need if they are to understand news coverage of political affairs. We find that a considerable share of news coverage is presented in a language that may exclude voters with little pre-existing political knowledge. The language of news coverage is partially the result of an excessive use of expert sources, but also of the journalists own understanding of the kind of political knowledge voters can be expected to have. Keywords: Election campaigns, Expert sources, News coverage, Political journalism, Political knowledge

Previous research demonstrates that opposition to immigration increases when immigrant groups are seen as economically non‐viable and burdened with distinctive and unassimilable cultural practices. However, no research to date has investigated the parallel relationship between attributes of individuals and willingness to admit these individuals as legal immigrants. This study examines Norwegians’ evaluations of individual immigrants. Using an experimental design, specific attributes of immigrants are manipulated, making them appear more or less likely to make an economic contribution and more or less likely to assimilate into Norwegian culture. It is found that the decision to admit individuals is predominantly influenced by the immigrant's economic background. Norwegians are especially supportive of highly skilled immigrants. The immigrant's race is also relevant, but the effect of racial cues varies between men and women. Immigrants with an Afrocentric appearance are more likely to be rejected by men, but accepted by women. The article recommends that immigration researchers measure public support for immigration at both the policy and individual immigrant levels.