Immigration in French Newspapers Post Terrorist Attacks : A study of the framing of immigration in Le Monde & Le Figaro after the Charlie Hedo attack

Abstract: The purpose of this thesis is to explore how the topic of immigration was framed by the two French newspapers Le Monde and Le Figaro in their political online sections during the two weeks following the terror attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Applying frame analyses on textual articles published during this time, this paper can conclude that five frames manifested themselves. Furthermore, a high degree of political parallelism, characterized by what Robert Entman refers to as content biased news coverage, was detected that greatly distinguished the two newspapers coverage of immigration. Le Monde, commonly erred to as a left-centrist paper, never openly criticized the ruling leftist government during the time frame studied. Contrastingly, Le Figaro, commonly referred to as a right-centrist paper, was overtly sceptic towards the socialist party, and framed multiple articles arguing that the right-wing populist party Front National was unjustly treated by the left as well as arguing for the legitimacy of the right-center party UMP. Based on the theoretical approach of framing, this thesis concludes that the media culture of both Le Monde and Le Figaro display characteristics greatly influenced by their political orientations. This paper also concludes that the two newspapers’ framing of the immigration topic was directly and consequently related to actions by the controversial right-wing populist party Front National. This implies a salience of ideological orientation of the newspapers in their framing of the news framing.Whether and how this framing of the news related to the terror attacks affected the opinions of their readers would be an interesting focus for future research.