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Existing studies demonstrate that threat perceptions matter for immigration attitudes. However, while these perceptions are potentially sensitive to information about immigrants' impacts, questions remain about whether inserting such information into public debates changes attitudes and policy preferences—especially on polarizing issues like immigration. Moreover, few studies have considered messages featuring the type of nonphotorealistic visual elements that increasingly appear in media. Using a survey experiment fielded in the United Kingdom, we examined whether evidence about European Union immigrants' modestly positive economic impacts on the United Kingdom—presented either as text, with visualizations, or as an animated film—changed immigration attitudes and policy preferences. Although visual elements did not have an effect over and above text, all the informational treatments moved attitudes and preferences in positive directions, even among Leave voters. Our study brings together research on immigration public opinion and visual media and has implications for policymaking and journalism practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do governments visually communicate policies, and what does this reveal about actors' political objectives? Governments strategically narrate their priorities, yet few studies examine this process through visual modes. We contribute to theoretical and empirical understanding in policy studies by focusing on the UK government's COVID-19 response through its daily press briefings during the first wave of 2020. Combining quantitative changepoint and content analysis with qualitative discourse analysis, we examine all 79 sets of slides when briefings occurred. We identify a reactive phase focused on communicating knowledge about the pandemic in a boundedly rational manner, and a proactive phase that created new policy-based narratives of the pandemic. Besides contributing to emerging pandemic-related policy scholarship, we argue that conceiving these visualizations as visual narrative assemblages is relevant more broadly because it shifts attention to the interaction and interdependence of multiple visualizations as they enable policymakers to perform their authority to govern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and how does press coverage maintain independence from governments’ preferred language? Leading scholarship argues that elites shape media content, especially in foreign affairs settings where journalists rely on official sources. But do media push back in domestic policy contexts? Focusing on immigration in Britain, we find press coverage exhibits signs of autonomy that rely on the state’s administrative branches. Our evidence comes from automated linguistic analysis of 190,000 items of migration coverage in nineteen national British newspapers from 2006 to 2015, and press releases published by the U.K. Home Office between 2010 and 2015. We show that the press increasingly portrayed immigration in terms of its scale. Then, by comparing the dynamics of a key government policy—lowering “net migration”—in press and Home Office rhetoric, we illustrate the limits of the government to insert its desired language into the press. Finally, we argue routine press interactions with the nonpolitical Office for National Statistics enabled coverage that diverged from politicians’ preferred lines. Our study contributes to press-state theory by providing evidence of media semiautonomy in a domestic policy arena, and highlighting the often-overlooked role of routine, bureaucratic procedure in supporting that autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opposition to immigration in Britain reflects perceptions of immigrants that focus disproportionately on "illegal" immigration and asylum seekers, rather than more numerous workers, students, and family members. This study examines coverage of immigration in the British national press, to see whether press portrayals of migrants provide a basis for these images of immigration underlying public attitudes. We use corpus linguistic methods to analyze 43 million words of news from 2010 to 2012. Among other findings, we show that press portrayals match public perceptions of migrants, with "illegal immigrants" and "failed asylum seekers" as predominant depictions in broadsheet and tabloid newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]