Religion and Media 2004 Abstracts
Religion and Media Interest Group
Discord and religious identity: News framing of Muslims in the Kashmir conflict. • Sandhya Bhattacharya, Pennsylvania State University • For the past five decades (and more) the state of Jammu and Kashmir has been a territory of contention between India and Pakistan. This paper examines the conflict in Kashmir from a religious perspective. Given the growing popularity of a Hindutva ideology and increasing communal tensions within the country, the study asks how Muslims in Kashmir, Pakistan, and India are framed with regard to the conflict. Content analysis has been used to identify news framing patterns of Muslims. Results indicate that Indian newspapers do indeed focus more on Muslims than Hindus and that news frames of Muslims tend to be a lot more negative than positive. Implications of such framing patterns are discussed with regard to the nature of communal relations (between Hindus and Muslims) in India.
Spirituality Online: Teen Friendship Circles and the Internet • Lynn Schofield Clark, University of Colorado • Several recent studies of religion and online virtual communities have set out to demonstrate the ways in which the Internet is radically altering how people experience and participate in religious life in contemporary society. With its starting point in the “offline” social environment of young people, this article expands upon that research, offering an analysis of narratives gathered with in-depth individual interviews and focus groups. The paper explores how young people of various levels of religious commitment are using new communication technologies in relation to their religious practices and beliefs. It argues for an analysis that views teens as both consumers and producers of religious and spiritual meaning online.
The Gospel of Freedom and Liberty: George W. Bush, the “War on Terror,” and an Echoing Press • David Domke, Kevin Coe and Robert Tynes, University of Washington • Freedom and liberty long have been core elements of U.S. national identity, dating to the mythic founding of the nation as a republic that would serve as a beacon of democracy. In the months following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration emphasized these values in reconstructing what Niebuhr has called a nation’s positive “social myth”: a culturally embedded narrative that distinguishes a nation from others, justifies its existence, and establishes a sense of superiority to others. The focus of this manuscript is on how these values were presented in presidential communications and, in turn, often “echoed” by news coverage — as defining moral qualities of the nation that were divinely desired for all peoples, with the United States as the God-chosen promoter and defender of the values. The argument here is that such claims were simultaneously rooted in religious fundamentalism while engendering political capital in this period of crisis.
Independent News Web Sites’ Coverage of Religious Freedom and Restraints on Religion in Central Asia • Eric Freedman and Maureen Walton, Michigan State University • The five Central Asian governments tightly control religious freedom and practices. Most mass media is state-owned or tightly controlled, and journalists exercise self-censorship even without official censorship. One result is a dearth of reporting by domestic media about religious freedom issues. Western-based Web news sites provide alternative venues for covering these issues. This study examines types of religion-related coverage by three Web news sites, their use of unnamed sources and journalists’ pseudonyms, and where their journalists report from.
A Quantitative Comparison of the Portrayals of Islam in British and American Newspapers • Mark Hungerford, University of Texas at Austin • This content analysis contrasted coverage of Islam in four prominent newspapers in America and Britain during the two years after September 11, 2001. Five variables were coded on stories about Islam: if it appeared in a conflict frame; if Muslims were depicted as violent; context of coverage; valence of coverage; and lexical usage of the adjectives “Muslim” and “Islamic.” Overall, coverage varied little among the four papers, suggesting similar news values about Islam in both countries.
“We can get redress nowhere”: Seditious libel and free expression for early nineteenth century Native Americans, as told in Indian Nullification by William Apess, • Kevin R. Kemper, University of Missouri at Columbia • William Apess, a Native American preacher and political activist, used press clippings in a book entitled Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe to defend himself against a charge of seditious libel and build a case against his ministerial accusers. Also, his story gives a glimpse into the meaning of free expression during the 1830s in Massachusetts, as well as introduces Apess to journalism and mass communication scholars.
Mapping the Landscape of Compassionate Conservatism: Analyzing the Moral Vocabulary of a Religious and Political Discourse • Brian M. Lowe, SUNY at Oneonta • Since its emergence in 1998, the term “compassionate conservatism” has drawn varying degrees of media attention as to how it synthesized particular religious conceptions of charity and service with recent understandings of (neo) conservatism. This paper utilizes the moral vocabularies strategy (Lowe, 2002) to examine the compassionate conservatism discourse as articulated in the documents in the Compassionate Conservatism Archive at the White House web site. This analysis focuses on examining what specific moral claims and policies were promoted by the Bush Administration as “compassionate conservatism” in order to construct an ideal type of what constitutes this emerging form of political and religious discourse.
Spirituality that Sells: An Analysis of Religious Imagery in Magazine Advertising • Rick Clifton Moore, Boise State University • Little research has been done on religious dimensions of one of the most powerful media forms, advertising. In this study I conducted a content analysis of advertisements in three popular national magazines to determine how much religious imagery is present in them, and how it is portrayed. Only a small number of ads were found to include religious images. Equally important, use of imagery from eastern religions was very different from use of western ones.
Dueling Southern Baptist Press Agencies: An Examination of Coverage of Denominational Controversies by Baptist Press and Associated Baptist Press • Bryan Murley, University of South Carolina • On July 17, 1990, the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee fired the two top journalists at Baptist Press, the official news agency of the SEC. In the wake of these firings, a group of Southern Baptist journalists formed the Associated Baptist Press. As the two agencies covered controversies within the denomination, it became evident that they were covering the same events from vastly different worldviews. This study examines themes that emerged from this coverage.
Religion in the Box: Religious Television Programming and Viewership in the Philippines • Elena E. Pernia, University of the Philippines • This study sought to discover religious cultural adaptation by Christian programs and networks in the Philippines, using a combination of content analysis, survey, and in-depth interviews. A good number of these programs exhibits adaptation in terms of content and production values. However, there is no conclusive evidence to indicate that audiences, who adherents of different Christian religions, have accommodated such shows as regular habit. Hence, the influence of these shows on audiences is limited.
Church and State in Utah: Local Newspaper Coverage of the LDS (Mormon) Church and Political Actors over a First Amendment Controversy • David W. Scott and Christopher S. McDonald, University of South Carolina • This study compares an LDS Church-owned newspaper with a secular newspaper in their portrayals of the LDS Church and city officials during a political controversy. Both newspapers emphasized Conflict. The secular newspaper discursively constructed the political divide as primarily religious (framing Mormons as exerting undo influence on politics). While the church-owned newspaper acknowledged the religious divide, emphasis was placed more on divisions between local lawmakers and the mayor.
John Bascom’s Journalism: Moral Force and Proto-Progressivism • Jeffery A. Smith, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee • One liberal Christian and reform writer often overlooked in histories of the Social Gospel movement and the Progressive Era is John Bascom (1827-1911), a moral philosopher whose books and essays were in the forefront of American religious and political thought. A severe critic of the shallow, sensational, and partisan newspapers of his time, Bascom looked deeper than current events and sought systematic cures for individual and social ills.
Architecture And Land Use As Religious Speech: A First Amendment Frontier • Robert L. Spellman, Southern Illinois at Carbondale • Faith communities speak through the location and design of their churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Although below the radar screen of most of the public, a great conflict between faith communities and public authorities has ensued since the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith in 1990 that strict scrutiny did not apply when free exercise of religion was curtailed by laws of neutral applicability. The paper argues that free speech jurisprudence offers a constitutional shield for faith groups faced with government efforts to either control their location through zoning or dictate their message through architectural and historic preservation laws.
The New York Times’ Coverage of the Holocaust • Toby R. Stark and Beth Olsen, University of Houston • This content analysis examines the amount and type of media coverage of the Holocaust by the New York Times from 1933 – 1941, specifically related to the agenda-setting and framing theories. The New York Times was selected because it is considered an elite publication – other media outlets often cover an issue after it has been reported in the New York Times. Results show that the New York Times minimized the importance of the Holocaust in its coverage.
Geopolitical Imaginations about Mormons in News and Popular Magazines, 1910-2002 • Ethan Yorgason and Chiung Hwang Chen, Brigham Young University at Hawaii • This paper explores news and popular magazines’ portrayals of Mormonism through the lens of geopolitics. It argues that geopolitical reasoning dangerously exacerbates difference and represents people as essentialized and threatening Others. Media portrayal of Mormonism through Protestant inspired geopolitical reasoning was strong throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. Geopolitical content in stories about Mormonism moderated in subsequent decades, but geopolitical reasoning flared up under liberal secular guises in the 1970s and 1980s. Continued use of geopolitical terminology and themes remains a problematic feature of stories about Mormonism.
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