Shaping Immigration News

Rodney Benson is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Sociology, at New York University. Benson's research lies at the intersection of the sociology of culture, comparative media systems, political communication and journalism studies. His numerous articles have been published in such leading journals as the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Communication, the European Journal of Communication, Press/Politics, and Political Communication, as well as Le Monde Diplomatique and the Christian Science Monitor. Benson is also co-editor of Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (with Erik Neveu, 2005) and co-author of the Free Press public policy report Public Media and Political Independence: Lessons for the Future of Journalism from around the World (with Matthew Powers, 2011).

• 1. Introduction: why study immigration news?; 2. The French and US journalistic fields: position, logic, and structure; 3. Narrating the immigrant experience in the US media: from jobs threat to humanitarian suffering; 4. Organizing the immigration debate in the French media: giving voice to civil society and strategizing against Le Pen; 5. Explaining continuity and change in French and US immigration news; 6. What makes the press more multiperspectival?; 7. What makes for a critical press?; 8. Does the medium matter? Television news about immigration; 9. Conclusion: the forces of fields and the forms of news.

'Shaping Immigration News uses one of the most salient and challenging issues facing contemporary democracies - immigration - as a lens through which to examine that critically important democratic institution, the press. Comparing the experiences of France and the United States for explanatory leverage, the author of this fine book identifies and tracks the prevalence of alternative frames and authorized spokespersons in immigration news over four decades - and in so doing demonstrates how institutional differences in the journalistic field refract coverage of events and debates in striking and often unanticipated ways.' Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University, New Jersey