Media Consumption and Attitudes Towards Immigration in Canada

Background and Purpose: In recent years, there has been a rise in anti-immigration sentiment in a number of countries, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, fueled in part by concerns about economic competition, cultural differences, and national security. One factor that has been implicated in shaping attitudes towards immigration is media consumption. According to the parasocial contact theory, the media can play a crucial role in influencing public attitudes towards immigrants by framing the population in particular ways. Research has generally found that individuals who consume more media, particularly news media, tend to hold more negative attitudes towards immigrants. However, the relationship between media consumption and various attitudes towards immigration in Canada, the country renowned for its receptiveness to immigration and multiculturalism, is not well understood. As such, the aim of this study is to address this research gap by investigating the relationship between media consumption and attitudes towards immigrants in Canada and also if the parasocial contact hypothesis holds true in Canada, especially even following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: We used secondary datasets from three years of the Democracy Checkup Survey (2019–2021). Only the respondents who answered all sociodemographic, media consumption, and immigration attitudes questions were included in the analyses. The sample size varied across the years, with 2,523 in 2019, 3,553 in 2020, and 7,331 in 2021. The dependent variables include four types of immigration attitudes: 1) receptiveness to immigration (the extent to which Canada should accept immigrants in the future), 2) perceived cultural threat (the extent to which recent immigrants do not fit into Canadian society), 3) perceived economic competition threat (the extent to which immigrants take jobs away from other Canadians), and 4) nationalism (the extent to which Canadian society should look after Canadians born in the country more compared to immigrants). The two main independent variables are the frequency of consuming 1) news and 2) social media. We adjust for age, gender, ethnicity, education, household income level, employment status, region, immigration history, and political party preference. Following a descriptive analysis, a set of binomial and multinomial logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine the association between media consumption and attitudes towards immigration within each year and across all years pooled.

Results: The results indicate that news consumption was associated with positive/favorable immigration attitudes within each year and across all years pooled. In contrast, social media consumption was generally not associated with immigration attitudes.

Conclusions and Implications: The findings suggest that media consumption and subsequent parasocial contact with immigrants, especially that of news, plays an important role in shaping positive public attitudes towards immigration in Canada. The conclusion contrasts with previous research findings in other countries that support that media reinforces negative perceptions of immigration/immigrants. Furthermore, the study results also imply that the anti-immigrant sentiment that had intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic did not weaken or alter the association between media consumption and positive attitudes towards immigration in Canada.