Do New Media Support New Policy Narratives? The Social Construction of the U.S.-Mexico Border on YouTube

Narratives, or the telling of stories, are a powerful tool used to gain support for public policies. The advent of new social media, including YouTube, provides opportunities for less-mainstream narratives of cooperation, but are these opportunities being realized? Using the Narrative Policy Framework and Schneider and Ingram's Social Construction of target populations as the theoretical basis, we analyzed 95 English and Spanish YouTube videos focusing on the U.S.–Mexico border and found they demonstrate a maintained focus on mainstream, divisive issues such as security and violence, immigration, and drugs. However, although new media often cover mainstream issues, YouTube videos appear to construct more favorable perspectives of the border region than traditional media: 52 percent of the videos constructed a sympathetic view of the border, including the people associated with it, while 48 percent of the videos constructed an unsympathetic view. Understanding the use of these narratives can have real-world impacts for developing policy along the U.S.–Mexico border; possibly creating greater cooperation vital to solving many of the urgent problems border communities face on a day-to-day basis.