Creating a community that will attract and retain migrants requires the public to share in the vision of a multicultural Scotland, and political leaders must convincingly frame immigration as an important, relevant, and positive devel-opment for the average Scottish person. Framing involves creating a scheme of interpretation: ‘To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text’ (Entman 1993: 52). Successful issue framing includes three phases: the construction of information by political elites, the application of frames by the media, and the impact of frames on political actors and individual opinions (Matthes 2012). Previous chapters have covered the first phase of this process. This chapter focuses on the second phase involving how the media transmits ideas about immigration to the public, and briefly considers the third phase by comparing the opinions of newspaper readers. Research on media framing demonstrates that there is state-level variance in how the media covers immigration (Helbling 2014). Do similar differences manifest across sub-state regions in the UK?

This chapter compares how quality newspapers in the UK and Scotland cover immigration. It determines whether the Scottish public has access to a regional source of information that can impact their opinions about immigration in a meaningful way. This chapter uses a unique dataset of all newspaper articles published between 2013 and 2016 with ‘immigration’ in the title or keyword in three UK-wide and two Scottish broadsheet newspapers. It evaluates the tone of the articles and the issues and arguments that are associated with immigration in the print media. The chapter begins with a review of the newspaper market in the UK, followed by a discussion about how immigration is framed by the media, before describing the methodology employed in the analysis of 706 UK-wide and Scottish newspaper articles. The analysis explains the nuances in how immigration is framed in the UK-wide and Scottish newspapers to reveal some regional differences, though the biggest differences in framing and tone are attributable to the ideological bias of each newspaper. The chapter considers the implications of the analysis by reviewing how media framing influences the formation of public opinion, and uses survey data to compare the opinions of Scottish people by their preferred newspaper. The chapter concludes by summarising the findings and discussing their implications for Scottish decision makers.