Diversity in Western countries: journalism culture, migration integration policy and public opinion

Abstract

Earlier research has shown that public opinion and policy lines on the topic of immigrant integration are interrelated. This article investigates a sample of 24 countries for which data are available in the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), the World Values Survey (WVS), as well as in the Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS). To our knowledge, this is the first time that these data are connected to one another to study journalists’ views on their role to promote tolerance and cultural diversity in societies with diverging immigration policies. The WJS presents an analysis of the role conceptions of professional journalists throughout the world, including a variable measuring the extent to which journalists conceive promoting tolerance and cultural diversity as one of their tasks. Our findings show that journalists (as measured in the WJS) mostly tend to promote tolerance and cultural diversity in countries with more restrictive immigration policies (measured by MIPEX) and less emancipative values (measured by the WVS) Promoting tolerance and cultural diversity is associated with a so-called interventionist approach in journalism culture. Furthermore, we used cluster analyses to attribute the countries under study to meaningful, separate groups. More precisely, we discriminate four clusters of the press among the 24 countries under investigation.