The Usual Suspects: Offender Origin, Media Reporting and Natives' Attitudes Towards Immigration

Abstract

This paper analyses whether the systematic disclosure of criminals' origins in the press affects natives' attitudes towards immigration. It takes advantage of the unilateral change in reporting policy announced by the German newspaper Sachsische Zeitung in July 2016. Combining individual-level panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 2014 to 2018 with 402,819 crime-related articles in German newspapers and those newspapers' market shares, we find that systematically mentioning the origins of criminals increases the relative salience of natives' criminality and reduces natives' concerns about immigration, breaking the implicit link between immigration and crime.