ABSTRACT

One of the core premises of this book is that a central site for the debate over immigration, especially in its border security and integration parameters, has been the mass media, which play an important role in how publics come to understand controversial issues. 1 This is particularly true for newswire services, whose stories are reproduced in thousands of newspapers every day. 2 Furthermore, newswire stories often serve as a starting point for original work, thereby setting initial boundaries for reporting. 3 Newswire services are therefore important locales in which the construction of meaning occurs, yet they remain largely unstudied in academic literature. The purpose of this chapter is to provide the first systematic analysis and comparison of the social realities of immigration constructed and disseminated nationally by the leading newswire agencies in France and the United States—Agence France-Presse and The Associated Press—between 2007 and 2011.