Framing Deservingness in Canadian News Media
Dr. Rebecca Wallace, Queen’s University
Lecture | March 23 | On-demand | Online
Research on the framing of social assistance in Canadian media suggests that news coverage is “race-coded”, whereby Indigenous and immigrant welfare recipients are frequently portrayed as more or less deserving than non-Indigenous, native-born Canadians across a number of deservingness criteria. What are the effects of these frames on public opinion toward social assistance recipients, and support for redistribution more generally? And how do these frame effects potentially differ based on the recipients’ assumed race or country of origin?
This presentation reports the results of a custom-designed framing experiment that aims to understand how news frames affect attitudes toward Indigenous and immigrant recipients of welfare. The findings indicate that while the frames can have a significant impact on perceptions of recipients’ deservingness, the effects are conditioned by the beneficiaries’ identity as an Indigenous or immigrant recipient. Results, implications, and future research will be discussed.
Rebecca Wallace received her Ph.D. in political studies at Queen’s University. She holds a B.A.H. (with distinction) and an M.A. in political studies from the same institution. Rebecca’s research focuses on Canadian politics, broadly examining welfare chauvinism toward different racial minority groups and its manifestation in Canadian news media. Rebecca is a doctoral fellow at the Institute of Intergovernmental Relations and a research assistant for the Canadian Opinion Research Archive, and held a Joseph Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (2016-2019).
Royal Canadian Legion, US Branch #25 