Muslim neighbors or an Islamic threat? A constructionist framing analysis of newspaper coverage of mosque controversies

Abstract

In recent years, growing communities of Muslim-Americans have faced tension in a series of debates over the construction of Islamic prayer spaces in American cities. Islamic community members have found themselves fighting for representation within the political process and for their philosophical right to exist within American society. This study presents a framing analysis of the debate in five US newspapers between 2010 and 2013 as a way of examining the position of Muslims within contemporary American society. The study examines five frames: Local Regulation, Legal Authority, Political Debate, Muslim Neighbors, and Islamic Threat. The first three were episodic frames, while the other two were thematic. Some of the discourse showed evidence of Islamophobia, or indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims. Other stories showed evidence of Islamophilia, which is the stereotypical presentation of ‘good Muslims’ who are model citizens in contrast to the ‘bad Muslims’ who serve as rhetorical enemies.

Keywords

Islam Islamophilia Islamophobia media framing Moral Foundations Theory newspapers social constructionism

Introduction

In recent years, growing communities of Muslim-Americans have faced the challenge of claiming a space as ‘fully empowered as participants in civic and political life’ within the United States’ professed values of religious freedom and pluralism (Haddad and Ricks, 2009: 14). This remains a conflicted process – a conflict that some say is exacerbated by the ways Muslims are frequently stereotyped in media content and portrayed as a monolithic whole, with no regard for the broad diversity of Islamic beliefs and practices (Esposito and Mogahed, 2007; Morey and Yaqin, 2011; Said, 1997). Similar discourses surrounding Muslims in the public sphere have taken place throughout the West – from debates over hijab headscarves in France to the ban on the construction of minarets in Switzerland to the tightening of surveillance and anti-terror laws across the United States and Europe. In these debates, Muslims frequently find themselves at the center of a perceived conflict between national loyalty and religious identity. One of the most salient recent examples of this tension between American ideals and Muslim reality has surfaced in debates over the construction of mosques and other Islamic facilities in American cities.

The number of mosques in the United States surged 74% to more than 2100 in the first decade of the 21st century (Bagby, 2012a). These facilities focus primarily on social activities, educational programs, interfaith outreach, and worship services (Bagby, 2012b). But this growth in number has been accompanied by a series of public controversies during the construction approval process (Liu, 2012), with some opponents raising concerns about land use and others attempting to litigate Islam’s legitimacy as a religion. These debates provide a useful example of the challenge of pluralism, which Asad (2003) calls ‘a matter of embodied memories and practices that are articulated by traditions, and of political institutions through which these traditions can be fully represented’ (p. 178). In the example of mosque controversies, Islamic community members have found themselves fighting for representation within the political process and for their philosophical right to exist within American society. In these debates, they are forced to simultaneously address the technical merits of their projects while dispelling fears and misunderstandings over unrelated topics like ‘Shariah law’ and international terrorism (Liu, 2011).

This study presents a framing analysis of the debate in five US newspapers between 2010 and 2013 as a way of examining the position of Muslims within contemporary American society. As Bosman and d’Haenens (2008) note, an objective account of a controversial topic might be impossible, and the best we can hope for is a map of the reality the discourse represents. Furthermore, a framing analysis is a second-order map – an analytical diagram of the discursive plan provided by the media coverage. But conducting such an analysis offers us an opportunity to, as Gans (2004) put it, examine ‘what society tells itself about itself through the news and why’ (p. xxi).

Theoretical framework

Media framing

Media framing is most commonly described (Matthes, 2009) as the process of selecting and emphasizing certain problem definitions, causal attributions, moral evaluations, and treatment recommendations in media content to promote particular interpretations of issues and events (Entman, 1993). Previous research suggests that many understandings of an issue are possible, but some are made especially likely through the way stories are told in news content, because these retellings provide citizens with a discursive toolkit for making sense of public affairs (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). One of the news media’s primary functions is to provide some of the tools in this toolkit – an important task because ‘those tools that are developed, spotlighted, and made readily accessible have a higher probability of being used’ (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989: 10). Furthermore, different styles of presentation can influence audience understandings of an issue. For example, Iyengar (1994, 1996) described two types of frames: episodic and thematic. Episodic frames focus on specific and concrete illustrations of an issue, while thematic frames depict the news in broader and more abstract terms placed within a deeper context (Iyengar, 1996). Episodic frames tend to be tools used to support the status quo, in part because they are related to ingrained media routines that seem natural to journalists (Pavlik, 2001). There is evidence that thematic frames are stronger, but that strength can be reversed the more passions around a topic are inflamed (Aarøe, 2011).

As originally proposed by Goffman (1974), framing began as a way of analyzing how humans organize experience in the social construction of reality. Today, some framing researchers continue this constructionist approach to framing theory, assuming that there is not a single correct and stable account of the real world, but versions generated by the selective perceptions of the perceiver, in conjunction with individual attitudes, interests, knowledge, and experiences (McQuail, 2010). This constructionist paradigm focuses on what a frame is and how different frames arise (Vliegenthart, 2012), regarding them as tools that are accessible – in varying degrees – to a variety of social actors (D’Angelo, 2002; Reese, 2007). Vliegenthart and Van Zoonen (2011) summarized a constructionist research agenda in a series of axioms: frames are multiple and can be oppositional; they are part of a struggle for meaning between actors with unequal resources; they are the result of routinized processes; and the frames used by audience members are socially situated and combined with other social processes.

The strength of the constructionist approach to framing is that it ‘provides the most elaborate account of what a frame actually is and how different frames arise’ (Vliegenthart, 2012: 937). It does not ignore issues of power in the ways that cognitive-based scholarship does, nor is it as deterministic on the subject as critical scholars are. Rather, media discourse is one part of a larger cultural picture where challenges to the messages of the powerful can be mounted by social movements, and where audience members can create competing constructions of reality based on their daily lives as well as media imagery (Gamson et al., 1992). In this context, ‘the media are not passive conduits, but rather active participants in shaping the dominant frame for a given issue’ (Bell and Entman, 2011: 553).

Some constructionist analyses bear a resemblance to critical perspectives – especially in the way they acknowledge that journalists and others have limited autonomy to use frames to foster certain understandings of the social world at the expense of other understandings by obscuring important parts of reality (Glassner, 2000; Reese, 2010). However, constructionism differs from the critical approach in that it suggests a process ‘in which individuals and groups actively create social reality from different information sources’ (Van Gorp, 2010: 84) rather than being merely subjected to elite reality constructions. Because media producers are embedded in the same cultural system as their audiences, the constructionist paradigm provides a ‘discourse-centered conceptualization of power’ which ‘may allow for a more realistic, sophisticated understanding of relationships between producers, content, and audiences/citizens’ (Hardin and Whiteside, 2010: 315).

Islamophobia and Islamophilia

Much of the current discourse surrounding Islam in the Western public sphere revolves around questions over whether Islam represents a threat that must be resisted, or whether Muslims are subjected to a particular type of religious-based bigotry in Western societies. The term ‘Islamophobia’ has been used to denote this type of anti-Islamic animus. But the scholarly debate over the term and whether it denotes an actual phenomenon has been fierce.

The term Islamophobia first emerged in the late 19th century to describe Muslims as ‘the implacable, absolute and eternal enemies of Christianity, Christians, Europe and Europeans’ (Bravo López, 2010: 568), but it has only gained currency in the last two decades. The concept of Islamophobia came into prominent academic and public use following a milestone report by the Runnymede Trust (1997) titled ‘Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All’. That report defined Islamophobia as ‘unfounded hostility towards Islam’ as well as ‘the practical consequences of such hostility in unfair discrimination against Muslim individuals and communities, and to the exclusion of Muslims from mainstream political and social affairs’ (Runnymede Trust, 1997: 4).

The Runnymede report defined eight indicators of Islamophobia, including whether Islam or individual Muslims are depicted as monolithic and static or diverse and dynamic, other and separate or similar and interdependent, inferior or equal, and an aggressive enemy or cooperative partner. This definition asks whether Muslims are depicted as manipulative or sincere, whether Muslim criticisms of Western policy are rejected or debated, whether discrimination against Muslims is defended or opposed, and whether anti-Muslim discourse is seen as natural or problematic. Imhoff and Recker (2012: 822) developed a scale based upon these items and found that they outperformed other scales related to subtle bias. They also differentiated two different forms of criticism of Islam – Islamoprejudice and secular critique. The first form was related to automatic forms of prejudice, while the other identified ‘nonprejudiced but highly critical views’ of Islam. However, one might question whether the authors’ own support of a particular type of laicist social discourse blinded them to the types of prejudice lurking behind some forms of secularism.

Although the Runnymede definition is widely cited in discussions of Islamophobia, some researchers have found its array of indicators unsuitable as a conceptual definition for research purposes. The attempt to define Islamophobia is a challenge that scholars continue to undertake. Some focus on fear or dread directed toward the religion of Islam or the Muslims who follow that religion (Abbas, 2004; Lee et al., 2009); others suggest that it transcends fear and is directed at Islam but not individual Muslims (Semati, 2010; Zuquete, 2008); finally, others suggest it goes beyond merely fear to include concrete action (Bleich, 2011; Stolz, 2005).

Ali et al. (2011) included consequences when he defined Islamophobia as ‘an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from America’s social, political, and civic life’ (p. 9). On the other hand, Semati (2010) called it an ‘ideological response that conflates histories, politics, societies and cultures of the Middle East into a single unified and negative conception of an essentialized Islam, which is then deemed incompatible with Euro-Americaness’ (p. 256). Shryock (2010) explains that the term

could reasonably be applied to any setting in which people hate Muslims, or fear Islam, but […] is most frequently invoked, and has its richest connotations, when used to describe a sentiment that flourishes in contemporary Europe and North America. (p. 2)

Although Islam is not a race, some scholars characterize Islamophobia as a form of racism (Frost, 2008). Sajid (2005) suggests it is a new form of racism in which the ethnic and religious Muslim peoples are socially constructed as a race, and negative assumptions are then made about the entire group. Allen (2010) defined it as an ideology similar to racism that perpetuates negatively evaluated meaning about Muslims and Islam in the contemporary setting; influences social action; shapes understanding, perceptions, and attitudes in the social consensus; and fosters exclusionary practices (and violence) against Muslims and Islam in social, economic, and political spheres.

Research suggests that religious affiliation could be a superior predictor of prejudice than race or ethnic background (Sheridan, 2006). Some suggest Islamophobia can be placed in the realm of in-group/out-group tensions

based on the image of Islam as the enemy and as a vital, irrefutable and absolute threat to ‘our’ well-being and even to ‘our’ existence, irrespective of how Muslims are identified, whether on the basis of religious or ethnic criteria. (Bravo López, 2010: 570)

In the results of a Swiss survey, Stolz (2005) found that Islamophobia was simply a type out-group phobia that was strongly linked to generalized xenophobia.

Increasingly, scholars have begun to grapple with this contested concept of Islamophobia and whether it is a distinct phenomenon that is suitable for empirical research. Stolz (2005) argued it is important for a definition of Islamophobia to encompass all phenomena attributable to it and suitable for comparison with other kinds of out-group phobias; to satisfy that, he proposed the definition ‘Islamophobia is a rejection of Islam, Muslim groups and Muslim individuals on the basis of prejudice and stereotypes. It may have emotional, cognitive, evaluative as well as action-oriented elements (e.g. discrimination, violence)’ (p. 548). Bleich (2011) suggested that it is important to conceptually define Islamophobia if researchers hope to measure its presence, causes, comparisons to other types of xenophobia, and changes over time. To that end, he offered a conceptual definition of Islamophobia as ‘indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims’, and suggested that it is important to study Islamophobia rather than trying to create a different term for the concept precisely because that term is already ubiquitous in ‘attempts to label a social reality – that Islam and Muslims have emerged as objects of aversion, fear, and hostility in contemporary liberal democracies’ (p. 1584).

The concept of Islamophobia is not without its critics. Some argue that it has been used as a mere tool to dodge warranted criticisms of Islam. For example, Halliday (1999) maintained the term Islamophobia can foreclose on debate by ‘denying the right, or possibility, of criticisms of the practices of those with whom one is having the dialogue’, including those who reject elements of Islamic teachings on human rights grounds or who challenge conservative readings of the faith from within (p. 899). More bluntly, some critics describe Islamophobia as ‘a word created by fascists, [and] used by cowards, to manipulate morons’ (Basu, 2014: 1). Lorente (2010) noted that criticism of the term Islamophobia takes a variety of forms based on religion, race, ethnicity, culture, etymology, ideology, and politics. At its core, though, the semantic criticism tends to be based on identity and different ways of seeing the world. ‘This implies that different social players try in one way or another to discredit the correctness or use of a term and, in short, the social players who use them’, wrote Lorente (2010: 126).

To further complicate the concept, recent scholars have begun to examine the other side of the Islamophobia coin: Islamophilia. Shryock (2010) explains that the Islamophilic presentation of the good Muslim tends to highlight the ‘affinity between the values of the good Muslim and those of the good citizen of the liberal democratic state’ (p. 10). Arat-Koç (2014) argued that Islamophobic and Islamophilic discourses are not opposites, but rather parts of an interrelated Orientalist logic that reduces understanding to a culturalist dimension. Islamophobia and Islamophilia are twin examples of what Mamdani (2004) calls ‘Culture Talk’, which makes the assumption that all cultures are defined by some sort of tangible essence that informs and explains the politics of its members. In contemporary discourse, this culture talk attempts to differentiate ‘good Muslims’ from ‘bad Muslims’, with the implication that ‘Islam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcized from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Muslims’ (Mamdani, 2002: 766).

Framing Islam in mosque construction debates

The construction of Islamic worship spaces in American communities is a particularly active site of controversy in recent years. There has been documentation of opposition to at least 53 such projects across the United States in recent years (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2013, April 8). These objections cover land use concerns as well as terrorism and other perceived social risks related to Islam. Bolstering the case that antipathy toward Islam itself is at the root of some of these debates, one survey showed that a quarter of Americans think local communities should be allowed to prohibit the construction of mosques if they desired (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2010, August 24). While this study focuses on the United States, similar dynamics have emerged worldwide. Such controversies include the following: a 2009 Swiss referendum to the construction of minarets; the cancellation of planned mosques projects in Padua and Bologna, Italy; a fierce campaign against a mosque in Bendigo, Australia; and longstanding inability for local communities to build mosques in Greece, Northern Ireland, and Spain (Abdelkader, 2014; Cambanis, 2010; Johnston, 2014).

Because these deliberations over mosque construction featured a wide range of stakeholders engaging in a discussion at the local level that resonated nationally (and sometimes internationally), this is a topic that is particularly suited to the culture-centered approach suggested by constructionist analysis. This study is based on a framing analysis of coverage in five American newspapers based in communities that had mosque controversies between 2010 and 2013. The stories were drawn from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (n = 45), the Chicago Tribune (n = 37), the New York Times (n = 83), the Nashville Tennessean (n = 145), and the (Temecula, Calif.) Californian (n = 39). These newspapers were selected for geographic diversity and because they are located near communities that had one or more controversial mosque project.

Based on the literature review above, this study aims to answer two research questions. In the first, we consider the frames that delineate the debate over mosque construction in the United States:

RQ1. What types of frames toward Muslims are evident in American news coverage of mosque controversies? Are these frames episodic or thematic?

Our second research focuses specifically on whether any of the frames can be said to be Islamophobic in nature. Using Bleich’s (2011) definition, we ask,

RQ2. Do any of the frames feature indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims?

Method

The frames were found using a cluster analysis technique developed by Matthes and Kohring (2008). In this technique, variables related to the framing components in Entman’s (1993) conceptual definition of framing – problem definition, causal attribution, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation – were individually coded. Following that coding process, a cluster analysis was conducted using Ward’s (1963) method. The cluster analysis shows patterns in the texts, which can be called frames (Matthes and Kohring, 2008).

Problem definitions were operationalized as a combination of sub-issues and sources; causal attributions were operationalized as whether responsibility for the controversy was attributed to mosque opponents or mosque supporters; and treatment recommendations were operationalized as calls for or against building a mosque. Moral evaluations were operationalized using the five moral foundations proposed by Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) as proposed by Graham et al. (2013). These foundations, expressed as oppositional pairs, include care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Previous researchers have found morality to be a difficult concept to measure directly in frames (D’Haenens and De Lange, 2001). Because it is proposed for analyzing morality at a cultural level, using MFT to operationalize moral evaluations provides a theoretically grounded way of improving that measurement.

After the quantitative results were compiled, a qualitative analysis was conducted. For this analysis, individual articles were printed and grouped by frame membership. Using the dominant components of each frame from the quantitative analysis as a guide, the stories were analyzed to determine the extent to which they formed a coherent, thematic whole, and whether that whole was related to the contours of the frame as suggested by the quantitative analysis. In addition to looking for stories that fit well with the frame, attention was paid to stories that seemed to be outliers that were not a good fit.

Framing analysis

To answer RQ1, the cluster analysis revealed five frames related to the mosque debates: Local Regulation, Legal Authority, Political Debate, Muslim Neighbors, and Islamic Threat. The dominant characteristics of each frame are discussed below. To answer the second part of the research question, we discuss whether the frames are episodic or thematic. The Local Regulation, Political Debate, and Legal Authority frames can be classified as episodic frames, which focus on individuals and events and focus on people and processes; the Islamic Threat and Muslim Neighbors frames can be classified as thematic frames, connecting the issue to broader societal contexts and displaying broader implications (Iyengar, 1994; McCombs and Ghanem, 2007). We will discuss both in greater detail, our main concern with the second group where we see indications of Islamophobia and Islamophilia.

Episodic frames

Local regulation frame: ‘It’s not about religion, it’s about zoning’

The Local Regulation frame covered the issue in process-related terms, describing the day-to-day developments in local mosque debates and associated ‘breaking news’ updates. These stories described the developments of the controversy and were not concerned with the deeper underlying issues, maintaining the appearance of ‘objectivity’, which is a dominant occupational norm in American journalism (Schudson, 2001). This is consistent with Iyengar’s (2005) description of the episodic frame as one that ‘depicts issues in terms of individual instances or specific events’ (p. 6). The Local Regulation frame included a variety of seemingly unrelated stories, varying from the definition of public space to reports of vandalism and arson, but all stories fit an overall pattern: they were breaking news reports that featured public sources (i.e. police and fire) and mosque community members responding.

Because these are generally hard news stories, they appeared to strive for a clinical sort of objectivity. One way the framing attempted to appear objective is through the frequent emphasis of numbers. Articles in this frame frequently gave precise square footages and discussed buffers, floodplains, and height restrictions. Real estate stories that discussed prices and stories that focused on a municipality’s legal bills for responding to litigation over these developments were also included. Within this environment of facticity, most of the discussion in the Local Regulation frame centered on definitions of public space – often in terms of the character of a surrounding neighborhood. What defines a mosque? What makes a neighborhood residential? How can a community define the ‘character’ of a neighborhood – and who has the authority to determine that definition? These questions assume a moral dimension because a community is by definition an in-group, which is the concept at the center of this frame’s dominant moral evaluation of loyalty.

Some complaints were couched in the systems of authority that govern what kinds of building projects are allowed or prohibited in a community. Traffic, noise, flooding, lights, and other characteristics of a large development were posed as the problem, regardless of use. For example, one resident near Atlanta said during a city council meeting, ‘it has nothing to do with religion. If Publix wanted to put a grocery store down there, we’d be just as unhappy’.

Legal authority frame ‘Someone will win. Someone will lose’

The Legal Authority frame consisted solely of stories about legal processes and is also consistent with Iyengar’s (1991) notion of episodic framing. Legal proceedings are described in definitive terms, highlighting the authoritative role of judges in determining outcomes. Most stories illustrated lawsuits filed in opposition of local government approval or denial of mosque projects. In these stories, ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ parties were identified and relevant background details were cited as part of the narrative, such as when discussing allegations of religious discrimination in the application of zoning laws. The moral foundation of authority was dominant because of the conclusive terms in which legal proceedings are described. Judges ‘decide’ issues, legal disputes are ‘resolved’ or ‘settled’, lawsuits are ‘dismissed’, arguments are ‘rejected’, opposing parties are ‘ordered’ into mediation. This authority to decide with finality was at the heart of a comment by one Atlanta judge who noted in the Journal-Constitution that when he rules, ‘Someone will win. Someone will lose’.

This frame was dominated by stories from the Nashville Tennessean, which chronicled a dramatic case that included an 8-day trial spread out over 3 months and was followed by several years of appeals. In this case, opponents took to the courts to try to overturn the approval of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. The mosque was not a party to the suit, thus its members were not part of the defense. As a result, this is the only frame in which Muslim community members did not make up a major component. At the same time, the stories in this frame allowed opponents of the Murfreesboro mosque to air highly controversial (and mostly unsupported) claims against Islam as a religion, portraying it as a violation of the moral foundation of loyalty in the extreme. For example, one plaintiff was quoted saying about Islam, ‘The religion part is less than 30%. The rest of it is about killing nonbelievers’. Another plaintiff testified that she believes Islam endorses ‘beheadings, forced conversions, and pedophilia’, although the article did not offer evidence that she had any expertise to speak authoritatively on these questions. The judge in the case rejected the arguments relating to Islam, although he ruled that there was insufficient public notice of the meeting and voided the approval of the mosque, but declined to stop construction.

Political debate frame: ‘From a local zoning dispute into a national referendum’

Also episodic in nature, the Political Debate frame presented the issue as discourse over a political issue. It contained stories about opponent protests, lectures, forums, open houses, and other similar types of open events. Such happenings are in and of themselves discursive events, and when reporters write about them, they often aren’t writing about the issue, but rather the performance of the debate surrounding it. This is tellingly suggested in one Tennessean story, which began ‘Debate over whether a mosque should be built just south of Murfreesboro packed 1,000 protesters into that city’s public square on Wednesday, police estimated’. Framed that way, it wasn’t the issue itself that packed the square, but the debate over it. This mirrors Iyengar’s (1994) notion of the episodic frame representing ‘only a passing parade of specific events, a “context of no context”’ (p. 140). While some stories did connect the local situation to thematic backdrops, these connections were presented as narrative details rather than efforts to highlight trends in the surrounding environment.

These symbolic demonstrations offered an easy way for reporters to present the opposing sides of the story. A vigil in Murfreesboro discussed signs with messages like ‘We’re all in this together’ and ‘My god is not a bigot’. A similar event in New York featured signs that said, ‘Religious tolerance is what makes America great’ while protesters from opposing sides angrily confronted one another. In Temecula, opponents wore clothing emblazoned with slogans like ‘Proud American’ and brought dogs, which some Muslims traditionally find unclean. ‘American families all have dogs’, one protester said, using dog ownership as a proxy for in-group membership.

Such oppositional framing was common in the Political Debate frame. This is demonstrated in the leads of some the articles. Oftentimes, the lead would identify the issue as a debate and briefly summarize the two sides. For example, one lead in the Tennessean read, ‘Plans for a new Islamic center south of Murfreesboro have some residents denouncing the Muslim religion and others calling the dispute one of the ugliest displays of religious intolerance in the county’s history’. Similarly, a Chicago Tribune lead read, ‘On the one side, the issue is about the right to have a sacred space where believers can pray. On the other, it’s about preventing religious institutions from crowding residential neighborhoods’.

Another important part of the Political Debate frame was campaign politics. Even political figures with no direct connection to or responsibility for the issue offered their points of view – particularly as it related to the Park51 development in New York. Partially because 2010 was a midterm election year, candidates and partisan pundits across the country made statements about the project. Both candidates for Georgia governor spoke out against it. Illinois Governor Pat Quinn caused controversy when he compared New York’s ground zero to Pearl Harbor or Auschwitz and strongly urged Park51 organizers to ‘rethink their position’. A New York Times story dissected the political logic driving the issue on a national level, as partisans assumed positions that seemed to be based less on the merits of the project but on the political calculations associated with it. In the story, Republican Congressional candidates ‘intensified efforts to inject the divide’ over the Park51 development into the campaign discourse. Senate majority leader Harry Reid spoke out against the project, although the Times article immediately noted that the Democrat was ‘facing a difficult re-election fight’, subtly suggesting that his position was driven more by poll numbers than deeply held convictions. The Republican candidate for New York governor Rick Lazio used the issue during the primary campaign to ‘attract a burst of public attention to a campaign that had failed to gather much momentum’, according to the New York Times. However, the paper posited that he risked ‘alienating moderates’ in the general election by so doing. A Tennessee gubernatorial candidate took an overtly Islamophobic approach to the debate, musing ‘you could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, a way of life or cult, whatever you want to call it?’

Thematic frames

Thematic frames are said to point to the broader societal phenomena surrounding a story or controversy. Our frame analysis points to the Islamic Threat and Muslim Neighbors frames as thematic in nature for their focus on the issue rather than the event, as well as their presentation of public perspective.

Islamic threat frame: ‘They don’t want to be us’

The Islamic Threat frame was most strongly characterized by the moral evaluation of loyalty, where loyalty is associated with concepts like nationalism, patriotism, and protecting the homeland. Within the frame, protecting the dominant American in-group is of utmost importance. Thus, the in-group is ‘American’, and anything that is identified as ‘Islamic’ is considered out-group and, therefore, disloyal. The discourse in this frame went beyond opposition and approached demonizing, which is characterized by portraying a group not just as bad in a particular situation, but whose badness transcends the objective facts of a particular issue (Bosman and D’Haenens, 2008).

The Islamic Threat frame was marked by stories that are thematically consistent with the characteristics of Islamophobia as described by Shryock (2010), who described a typical Islamophobe as someone who is ‘apt to believe that Muslims are (openly or in the secrecy of their own mosques and languages) violent extremists, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian, averse to democracy, oppressive of women, culturally backward, and dedicated to establishing Islamic law around the world’ (p. 2). The fear of Islamic law – also called Shariah – was a common theme in the Islamic Threat frame. In the Temecula debate, one pastor described the United States as being based in part on Christian ideals, while ‘Islam is built on a foundation of laws and ideals that spur people to “strap bombs on children and go on shooting rampages”’. In fact, Temecula stories were so centered around the fear of Shariah that the Californian adopted a boilerplate phrasing included in most of the stories on the issue, describing the opposition position as mainly concerned with ‘Sharia law, which is defined as a set of rules that govern the lives of Muslims and that require them to impose that law on non-Muslims’. The use of Shariah in this context is consistent with previous research, which suggests it is frequently invoked in news stories to place Muslims in a discursive ‘out group’ (Hoewe et al., 2014).

The threat of terrorism cloaked in secrecy was another major theme. ‘Not enough people understand the political doctrine of Islam’, said one opponent of a mosque in Brentwood, Tenn. ‘The fact is that mosques are more than just a church. No one can predict what this one will be used for’. In the Californian, an opponent described a mosque as a ‘center of radicalization’ and ‘a place where people are brainwashed to become radicals’. Muslims, then, are portrayed as representing an unpredictable existential threat to in-group cohesion. ‘They don’t want to be us’, one Murfreesboro resident was quoted as saying, later adding, ‘Tennessee is a nice place … I don’t know how long it will stay nice’.

In this frame, the in-group of ‘Americans’ and the out-group of ‘Muslims’ seem to be mutually exclusive. Congruent with this interpretation is the oft-repeated phrase that 9/11 was committed ‘in the name of Islam’, which conflates the terrorist act of a few to a monolithic threat from many and excludes the possibility that Muslims can fully participate in the national tragedy. This refusal on the part of Muslims to fully grasp the depth of injury to the homeland encompasses the other secondary moral foundation in this frame: betrayal. This concept contains ideas of enemies, treason, terrorism, immigration, deception, and general ‘otherness’.

Muslim neighbors frame: ‘Acceptance bridges differences’

At the other end of the spectrum, the Muslim Neighbors frame was most strongly clustered around its treatment recommendation – nearly all of the stories suggested that the mosque should be allowed. A columnist in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution offered a summary of this frame in the passage: ‘In this country tolerance trumps ignorance, confidence defeats fear, and acceptance bridges differences’. This difference in theme can be seen in some differing terminology. For example, the Islamic Threat frame typically refers to Islamic community members as ‘radicals’ or attributes terrorist links to them. In the Muslim Neighbors frame, some of these same organizers are portrayed as ‘moderates’.

Discourse in this frame subtly played on in-group/out-group distinctions, but this time by suggesting that Muslims are not the out-group, but rather those who would deny Muslims their rights. To underscore this theme, the Tennessean ran several news stories and commentaries that connected contemporary anti-Muslim sentiment to the bigotry of the Civil Rights era or the Ku Klux Klan burning of the first Catholic Church in Murfreesboro in 1929. ‘The mosque site arsonists join the 1960 bombers and the KKK hiding behind white sheets: They never let facts get in the way of their own stupidity’, wrote one Tennessean columnist. Murfreesboro opponents were further described as ‘delusional’ and compared to Nazis – the most detested out-group association one can make in political discourse.

In other examples of this framing, a young Muslim girl is described in the Tennessean as holding a Barbie doll at prayer time, while some women eschewed headscarves and robes for slacks and makeup. ‘In some ways, it’s like any church service’, wrote the Tennessean journalist. In New York, the idea was similar, but the descriptions were grittier and more evocative of the big city. The fabric of the neighborhood includes a multiplicity of uses – including some that could be considered less-than-savory. ‘A strip joint, a porno store and a government-run bookie operation. No one has organized demonstrations to denounce those activities as defiling the memory of the men and women who died a few hundred yards away’, a New York Times reporter wrote. ‘But an Islamic center strikes a nerve for some’. This, the reporter suggests, is absurd.

Discussion

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of compelling scholarship that documents the ways in which Muslims are often ill-treated in media coverage (e.g. Ali and Khalid, 2008; Powell, 2011; Steuter and Wills, 2010). But the results of this study indicate that it would be an oversimplification to say representations of Muslims are uniformly negative. Rather, the situation appears to reflect the complexity described by Vliegenthart and Van Zoonen’s (2011) constructionist framing axioms.

This study uncovered an array of five oppositional frames that reflected the struggle for meaning between a variety of stakeholders – Muslim community members, local bureaucrats, national politicians, and local activists who opposed mosque projects for a variety of reasons. Some frames represented Muslims as ‘normal’ members of society, while others portrayed them as vectors of an inherent threat to the homeland. Routine news processes for covering municipal bureaucracy and legal proceedings shaped the discourse, as did the journalistic convention of objectivity evident in the desire to offer ‘both sides’ of an issue. Reflecting those routines, journalists favored sources with official titles and timed their stories to coincide with milestones in the bureaucratic process. Furthermore, the frames reflected the socially situated nature of the debates about Islam in the post-9/11 era and all the symbolic weight that attack and its aftermath carry.

The Local Regulation, Legal Authority, and Political Debate frames were all consistent with Iyengar’s (1996) notion of episodic framing. In these news stories, the narrative focused on presenting mosque controversies in process-related terms. This was particularly clear in the Local Regulation and Legal Authority frames. Although the Political Debate frame involved a more contextual presentation of events, covering protests, lectures, forums, and other forms of open events surrounding mosque controversies, it is nonetheless characteristically episodic. Stories in this frame mainly illustrated sequential details and ignored the sociocultural implications or trends surrounding the controversies. Iyengar (1996) argued that when significant issues are framed episodically, the audience is less likely to think of the issue in terms of its cultural, political, or historical roots. When the episodic frames organize the debate as disconnected instances of local bureaucracy, legal proceedings, and political campaigns, they elide broader concerns, such as the barriers religious, racial, and ethnic minorities face when attempting to fully participate in public life.

The other two frames were thematic in nature. While exposure to thematic frames can influence audience interpretations of an issue by offering important contextual cues about broader societal causes and solutions to issues (Iyengar, 1996), these thematic frames were not unproblematic. The Muslim Neighbors and Islamic Threat frames were consistent with Mamdani’s (2002) ‘culture talk’, or the ‘predilection to define cultures according to their presumed ‘essential’ characteristics, especially in regards to politics’ (p. 766). Mamdani (2002) argues that the practice of culture talk has served to equate religious experiences with political categories, as seen in the good Muslim/bad Muslim dichotomy. This dichotomy, regardless of the goodness or badness of the Muslim being referenced, serves to identify all Muslims primarily as ‘others’, and then to evaluate them as politically good or bad. Instead of drawing straightforward political differentiations between terrorists and civilians, culture talk situates Muslims as individuals whose suitability to civic life is worth questioning (Mamdani, 2002).

This dubious attitude toward Muslims is present in both the Islamic Threat and the Muslim Neighbors frames, where debates regarding land use and building permits are placed within the larger context of religious and political disputes. Despite the different sentiments toward Muslims captured in each frame, the showcased debates highlight the continuing status of Muslims as controversial members of American society, pushed to the margins and frequently spoken about more than they are listened to.

The concept of Islamophilia was particularly evident in Muslim Neighbors stories, which tried to demystify and normalize what goes on inside mosques, frequently by comparing them to churches. In doing so, these stories highlighted similarities between the nationally accepted religion of Christianity and the disputed faith of Islam. While these comparisons between Christians and Muslims may have benign intentions in their attempt to present both groups as practicing their Constitutional right to worship, these comparisons also erase the distinctively Muslim characteristics of these communities. In effect, Muslims’ right to worship becomes contingent on their practices being made intelligible to non-Muslims. These stories mostly portrayed Muslims as going out of their way to try to fit in and become part of the in-group, but there was also frustration expressed. A Nashville Muslim leader attributed the debate to representatives of the two major political parties who ‘are using … Islamophobia, the fear, for their own advantage’. A New York Times headline posed the question, ‘American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?’

The Islamic Threat frame, on the other hand, was marked by displays of naked Islamophobia. Stories in this frame frequently referenced fear, mainly pointing to Shariah law and terrorism as the causes for concern. In addition to presenting Muslims as fear-invoking parties, this frame also rigidly separates Muslims from Americans, suggesting that no individual can reasonably belong to both groups. As one Temecula mosque opponent stated in the Californian, ‘You can only be an American or a devoted Muslim’. These themes are consistent with Semati’s (2010) description of Islamophobia as the conceptualization of Islam as essentially incompatible with Euro-Americaness. By presenting the interaction between Muslims and Americans as representatives of civilizations that are fundamentally clashing (as proposed by Huntington, 1993), the Islamic Threat frame calls attention to the perceived doom associated with the idea of Muslim integration in Western society.

While these two thematic frames are seemingly diametrically opposed, they both perpetuate Islamophobic sentiments by calling attention to the speculated incompatibility of Muslims in the first place. Regardless of the approach, each frame separates Muslims from normative American society. These frames present Islam as a topic of debate, often tying this debate to broader concerns of American sovereignty and public safety. Therefore, regardless of how Muslims are explicitly discussed in any single story, they are consistently positioned at the center of an ongoing controversy. This is consistent with Vliegenthart and Van Zoonen’s (2011) first axiom: that frames are multiple and oppositional. Although each frame works to present mosque controversies in a unique and contrasting light, these frames have simultaneously emerged in American news media and shaped the overall positioning of Muslims as separate, controversial beings.

Our findings are consistent with some of the frames previously identified in literature pertaining to the coverage of Islam and Muslims. For example, (Bowe et al., 2015) found that newspaper coverage of Islam was not monolithically negative, but rather a mixed bag of Islamophobia, Islamophilia, and clinically balanced portrayals, with the contours of the debate occurring through competing frames, rather than within one frame. Manning (2006, 2004) found frames in Australian coverage that tied Islam to a violent threat, while Ibrahim (2010) differentiated between portrayals of conforming in-group American Muslims versus dangerous and armed out-group Muslims.

Limitations/future research

While care was taken in this analysis, there are naturally some limitations. This study used a mixed-methods approach to framing research that began with a quantitative content analysis and a clustering technique. In the resulting analysis, some stories were obviously part of one frame or another; however, each frame contained stories that were outliers that didn’t fit perfectly. These ambiguities underscore the need for mixed methods and triangulation to verify quantitative results through qualitative validation.

A greater limitation is the text-based nature of this analysis. Visuals transmit a tremendous amount of information to media consumers, yet framing researchers often ignore them. Future researchers should work to incorporate analyses of visual components of news stories alongside textual analyses to gain a broader understanding of what is happening in the stories.

Conclusion

The present study aimed to assess the position of Muslims within contemporary American society. The results show that Muslim-Americans are mediated beings in ways beyond their control. The debates over mosque construction projects show that, even as Muslim-Americans face the challenge of fitting into American society, they are also advancing a challenge to America’s self-image. As Haddad and Ricks (2009) noted, Muslim-Americans ‘are demanding that America live up to its values of pluralism and freedom of speech and religion and make room for its Muslim citizens, allowing them to be fully American and fully Muslim …’ (p. 30).

In the framing of local Muslim communities, journalists process information in dialogue with politically invested frame sponsors in ways that both reflect and add to the topic’s ‘issue culture’ (D’Angelo, 2002: 877). The media coverage analyzed in this study showed that this remains an active process in which Muslims are included, but in which political and ideological opponents are often allowed to define them in reductive and monolithic ways. As Muslim-Americans work to carve out a hybrid identity, a key part of their struggle will be challenging the dominant media discourse that insists on the incompatibility of the two parts of that hyphenated identity (Mohammed, 2015). It’s not enough to say coverage of Islam is too negative and should be more positive. As the results of this study show, even ostensibly positively valenced frames may perpetuate reductive stereotypes.

Footnotes

Funding

This research was supported with funding from the College of Communication Arts & Sciences and the Graduate School of Michigan State University.

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