Human Interest Framing of Irregular Immigration: An Empirical Study of Public Preferences for Personalized News Stories in the United States, France, and Norway

The media have a strong tendency to frame political issues with a focus on personal and emotional cases. We do not, however, know if there is a close link between the news media’s use of these frames and the news preferences of the public. Such a close relationship may exist either because human interest news coverage is driven by audience demand or because the public might be influenced by the degree of individual news stories in the news. On the other hand, the audience’s news preferences may be unrelated to the actual media coverage on irregular immigration due to citizens’ selective media exposure, which may be driven by political predispositions. Based on a large quantitative content analysis conducted in the United States, France, and Norway and a following public opinion survey in the same countries, we find that the application of a human interest frame in a country’s news coverage of irregular immigration does not correspond with the public’s preferences for this type of news coverage. On the individual level, our findings demonstrate that liberal audience groups favor human interest–framed news coverage, while conservatives do not agree that individual news stories would provide a better understanding of the issue of irregular immigration.