Paniagua-Ugarte, Mary FRAMING LATINO IMMIGRANTS: THREAT AND COUNTER-NARRATIVES IN NEWS AND SOCIAL MEDIA. 2026. Radford University, Thesis. Radford University Scholars' Repository.
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Abstract
This study examines how U.S. news and social media portray Latino immigrants through threat-based framing and the counter-narratives that challenge it. Drawing on Chavez’s (2008, 2013) concept of the Latino Threat Narrative, this study combines deductive coding of threat frames with inductive thematic analysis of newspaper articles and posts collected from X. The findings show that threat-based portrayals remained prominent across both media environments but took different forms. Latino-targeted threats appeared more directly on X, while news coverage relied more often on generalized anti-immigrant framing and emphasized criminality more heavily. The inductive phase identified five recurring counter-narrative themes that challenged threat-based discourse through different persuasive pathways, including coherence and fidelity. These findings suggest that immigration discourse across media is shaped by competing portrayals rather than a single dominant narrative and that the Latino Threat Narrative remains active even as its contemporary forms continue to evolve.
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races |
| Divisions: | Radford University > College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences > School of Communication |
| Date Deposited: | 19 Aug 2026 20:48 |
| URI: | http://wagner.radford.edu/id/eprint/1377 |
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