Displaced Discrimination? Media Coverage of China and Public Attitudes Toward Chinese Immigrants in the United States

ABSTRACT Although a large body of literature has demonstrated the impact of immigrant‐related media coverage in a host country on the public acceptance of immigrants, little is known about whether local media coverage of immigrants' home countries also matters for the extent to which locals include immigrants. Leveraging a pre‐registered survey experiment with an embedded list experimental design ( N = 1212) in the United States, we study American people's attitudes toward Chinese immigrants after their consumption of news that primes, with a negative tone, China's rising nuclear threat. The results reveal that, although not statistically significant, news exposure increased discrimination against Chinese immigrants among Democrats and Republicans by roughly 8% and 12%, respectively. News exposure prompted Republican respondents to express their discrimination against Chinese immigrants publicly. More interestingly, alternative media outlets were more powerful than mainstream media in eliciting anti‐Chinese immigrant sentiments in Republicans, and this effect was more pronounced among those with lower trust in mainstream media.