Emily Greene-Colozzi, Amy Adamczyk, and Senahan Kiyal Keles — Differences in Religious Framing of Muslims and Islam in American Media Coverage Before and After the Trump Campaign

40 published claims from this book.

• A presidential campaign’s rhetoric shifts how newspapers invoke religion when covering Muslims
• After Trump’s election, fewer newspapers framed Islam coverage religiously
• Circulation size, not being the New York Times, predicts news coverage differences.
• Contact with minority religions raises tolerance even as regional political sorting sharpens Muslim attitudes
• Counting mentions of religious elements serves as a soft proxy for framing
• Coverage of extremist offshoots makes rare violence stand in for an entire faith
• Discrete historical events shape media frames more than local context does
• Framing Islam around devotion produces more positive media portrayals of Muslims
• Framing Islam through religion rather than war yields more positive coverage
• Implicit campaign rhetoric can reshape how media discuss Muslims and religion
• Local culture shapes which stories newspapers cover and how they frame them
• Local religious context shapes how regional newspapers frame religious minorities.
• Local religious salience, not specific denominational mix, drives media quoting of clergy
• Measuring Trump’s effect requires dating the post-period from election, not campaign.
• Media frames shape meaning by selectively emphasizing aspects of a story
• Media framing of religion and politics shapes how sympathetic audiences feel toward a story
• Media framing shifts can reflect outlet politics rather than elite influence
• Media studies compare matched multi-year windows straddling the 2016 election
• Muslims and atheists are the most distrusted belief groups in America
• National outlets warrant separate sampling because their framing differs from local papers.
• Neutral-seeming security policy can encode religious exclusion in practice.
• News framing of religious claimsmakers varies across outlets, not geography.
• Newspaper coverage of Muslims fell by roughly half after Trump’s election.
• No single database contains every US news publication
• Political and religious demographics shape how media frame Muslims
• Politicizing a religious ban crowds religion out of news framing of the targeted group.
• Random-integer sampling yields representative local news samples when pools are large.
• Religious framing of Islam is the variable, not discrete media frames
• Religious identity terms double as markers for politics and migration
• Religious preference written into policy produces public and media backlash.
• Religious salience is a composite index of belief, prayer, attendance, and importance
• Repeated outrage-inducing stories make the most brutal acts define a whole religion.
• Routine religion details in news resist politicization more than partisan topics do
• Studies measuring coverage angle understate how framing actually constructs meaning
• Tiny populations can command outsized media attention after attacks.
• Trump’s election sharply reduced religious framing of Muslims in US newspapers.
• Trump’s political actions shifted how newspapers framed Muslims religiously
• US newspaper portrayals of Islam vary less by local politics than expected
• Visible celebrity claimsmakers can shift public frames and weaken opposition to a marginalized group
• Western media consistently paired Islam with terrorism across national outlets