Victims, burdens, and problems: A thematic analysis of Le Journal de Montréal news coverage of Roxham Road
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Roxham Road, a rural road in Quebec, was a longtime hotspot for migrants and asylum seekers entering Canada from the United States that the province’s news media paid close attention to, until the entry point was closed in March 2023. Scholarly research has identified frames in the coverage of this controversial crossing point between 2017 and 2019, when the number of irregular arrivals was considered a “crisis.” This article extends the research to the post-pandemic era, and during a new “crisis,” by presenting an inductive thematic analysis of 55 online news articles published in Le Journal de Montréal, the province’s most-read newspaper, throughout 2022. The results point to binary coverage that rarely speaks to migrants, and that portrays Roxham as a problem requiring policy-oriented solutions. Although aspects of the coverage remained stable in 2022, temporal and provincial specificities stand out, in particular the importance given to the French language, Quebec politics, and conflicts between the provincial and federal governments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".