The Mexicans in the News: Representation of Mexican Immigrants in the Internet News Media

Abstract

Using critical discourse analysis, this study examined news media's representation of Mexican immigrants. Sixty articles were analyzed from the Internet sites of ABC, CBS, and NBC news to uncover the ways in which Mexican immigrants and their stories are represented in the news articles and the kinds of discursive strategies used to create the articulations. The analysis of the articles focused on a variety of discursive strategies such as topicalization, omission, register, connotation, individuation versus collectivization in verbal and visual components of the articles. The analysis led to the emergence of 5 tones by which the online network news portray Mexican immigrants – empathetic, sympathetic, informative, impersonal, and opposing. The article discusses these tones in detail and in comparison to previous studies of news media representation of immigrants. It concludes with implications of problematic representations that were recurrent in the news articles.