Research Highlights Podcast
February 19, 2025
Media salience and polarization
Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski discusses how increased media coverage can polarize the views of moderate individuals.
Source: hadrian
In today’s political environment, immigration ignites fierce public debates on cable news networks and social media platforms. But how exactly does media coverage influence the way audiences think about this issue? While it’s clear the media plays a role in shaping public opinion, isolating its precise effects has proven challenging for researchers.
In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, authors Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski and Jérôme Valette examined how increased immigration coverage on French television influenced viewers' attitudes between 2013 and 2017. Their findings reveal that even neutral coverage of immigration can drive polarization, pushing people with moderate views toward more extreme positions.
Schneider-Strawczynski recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how she and her coauthor tackled the challenge of studying media influence, and what their findings mean for how news organizations should approach coverage of controversial topics.
The edited highlights of that conversation are below, and the full interview can be heard using the podcast player.
Tyler Smith: Immigration has been an issue in countries around the world. Why did you choose to study immigration in France?
Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski: France is an interesting country because it has always experienced different waves of immigration. It has always been a bone of contention in the political agenda. We have this nice statistic that since 1950 and up to present day, France has voted on a new immigration law on average every two years. So we talk about immigration all the time. That's why it's a context that is interesting to study perception and attitudes towards immigration. Between 2013 and 2017, there was a refugee crisis during which the European Union received in less than two years, more than 2 million refugees. This allows us to really leverage an increase in the media coverage of immigration for our analysis. It's also a period where you had a rise in nationalist and populist movements. The question about extremely negative attitudes towards immigration started to become very important in the public debate around that time.
Smith: A challenge in studying media effects is that people choose which news to watch. Why is that a problem, and how do you address it in this work?
Schneider-Strawczynski: There is a literature that shows that viewers tend to choose media platforms that conform to their own ideology. And we also see that this self-selection happens in our paper. Individuals who are more opposed to immigration are going to favor more conservative television channels, while those who are more immigration supporters are more likely to choose TV channels that are more favored by the intelligentsia, etc. In our paper, our main result is that the higher media coverage of immigration leads to a polarization of the public's attitudes toward the extreme. So, if we were to simply look at the impact of the global coverage of immigration on people's attitudes, we could also see a polarization effect like we do. But that could be just because people self-select into different channels that will expose them to a specific type of news that will reinforce their initial opinion, and it would not mean that the media coverage of immigration in itself would generate polarization. So, in our case, thanks to the panel dimension of our data and the fact that we know which channel each individual watched, we can control for these individual channels and use fixed effects that will mitigate these concerns related to the self-selection. That means that the variation we really look at will only come from the correlation between an individual attitude toward immigration and the monthly variation in the salience of immigration in his or her preferred television channel.
Smith: Can you just explain what exactly happened to people's views when they were exposed to more immigration coverage?
Schneider-Strawczynski: When the news coverage of immigration increases, individuals who have initially moderate attitudes will become more likely to report extremely positive or negative attitudes, depending on their initial belief. So those who were initially moderately positive become extremely positive. Those who were initially moderately negative become more extremely negative about it. And it's not the particular news coverage that generates this. The polarization of moderates occurs even when they are exposed to the same topics in a neutral tone or information from the same channel. Those who were already pro-immigration are also more likely to remain pro-immigration. In terms of mechanism (i.e. what explains this polarization from moderate to extreme), the evidence we have points in the direction of salience interpretation. We understand salience as a psychological process with which an individual's limited attention is increasingly drawn to a prominent topic, which will result in this topic being overweighted in subsequent decisions. So, the immigration coverage increase is going to raise the prominence of this subject in the minds of the TV viewers, and they will place a greater emphasis on the immigration topic when they form their opinion, which will eventually amplify their initial position from moderate to extreme.
I think this really calls for journalists and editorial teams to carefully think not only about how, but also about if they should talk or not about a topic, and to be careful about potentially having extreme candidates or extreme parties trying to dictate the media agenda towards topics that could benefit them.
Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski
Smith: If it's a matter of salience, that makes me wonder how persistent these polarized effects are. I could see people forgetting about a topic and then maybe becoming more moderate again. Did you find any evidence of that?
Schneider-Strawczynski: We measure the effect of exposure over the last month on attitudes today, so I think this is a topic for future research. But the preliminary evidence we have when we add leads and lags to our estimation is that the effect is not persistent. However, we think that it's extremely important in times where the coverage of immigration increases dramatically, for instance, before elections. If the increase in coverage changes people's attitude at election time, it can have quite important effects in terms of policy recommendations. So, it's not the same as a persuasion effect—the salience effect can reverse, but it does matter according to the timing of when the increase in the coverage of immigration happens.
Smith: Your findings suggest that even neutral coverage can drive polarization. What implications do you think this has for media outlets and how they should cover controversial topics?
Schneider-Strawczynski: I think it has a similar implication as the literature on fact checking, which usually shows that fact checking successfully corrects people's misconception and beliefs about immigration. But by talking about it again, it actually amplifies the topic even more, making it more salient, which can in the end reinforce initial attitudes. I think this really calls for journalists and editorial teams to carefully think not only about how, but also about if they should talk or not about a topic, and to be careful about potentially having extreme candidates or extreme parties trying to dictate the media agenda towards topics that could benefit them.
This policy recommendation is not only for journalists, but also for politicians. Because something interesting we saw in our data is that it's not the far right who talks more about immigration. It's usually the party in power and more mainstream parties. But then the question is whether it is better for mainstream parties to not talk about immigration because it might be helping extreme parties. I don't have the answer to that question, but I think that is something that is important to think about.
♦
“Media Coverage of Immigration and the Polarization of Attitudes” appears in the January 2025 issue of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Music in the audio is by Podington Bear.