Media Narratives in Response to Immigration Crises

How do media narratives shift in response to immigration shocks? I develop a dynamic model of political communications that predicts more positive immigration coverage soon after immigration shocks, which I call the humanitarian phase due to prominent themes of sympathy and vulnerability. As these shocks continue, I predict more negative immigration coverage—which I call the threat phase due to themes of material and symbolic threat—will become more popular as the media reflects the changing conditions of the shock and societal response. I focus on Colombia as a theory-building case, before I then test the generalizability of my theory using the cases of Brazil, Germany, and Poland. Empirically, I use a few-shot ChatGPT 4o model to classify articles from national newspapers in each of these countries and then illustrate changes in the proportion of immigration-focused media narratives over time. I find modest evidence for humanitarian and threat phases across most contexts, with more acute shocks prompting more pronounced humanitarian phases. These findings systematize elite discourse and its changing nature on salient issues, contributing to our understandings of the relationship between media coverage and societal responses to shocks.