Social Construction of Reality Television: An Analysis of Print Journalism Coverage of All-American Muslim

Understandably, the perception of Muslims in America was negative after September 11, 2001. Immediately after the terrorist attacks, scholars sought to understand the impact of the media coverage on perceptions of Muslim Americans. Nisbet and Shanahan (2004) found that less than a third of Americans felt that Islamic values were similar to Christian values. This study analyzes 271 articles from American newspapers and news wires covering the television show All-American Muslim, which was canceled after one season on The Learning Channel (TLC) (Goldberg, 2012)

Social Media coverage of “Maspero”: Solidarity between Muslims and Christians post The Egyptian Uprising

The current study examines the print and social media coverage of the “Maspero” massacre in Egypt, in which military forces attacked Coptic Christians in a predominantly Muslim country. By employing a qualitative content analysis, the authors examine the role of media in inducing a state of social cohesion. Data were collected from a state-owned newspaper, Al-Ahram, and an independent newspaper, Al-Masry Al-Youm. Data were also collected from a blog that compiles testimonies of witnesses to the “Maspero” massacre as well as three of Egypt’s best-known online activists: Alaa Abd El Fattah (@alaa), Salma Said (@salmasaid), and Rasha Azab (@RashaPress). The results reveal the themes of print and social media coverage of the events, with the suggestion that social media was much more effective in inducing social cohesion than the print media

Tweeting about terror: A World Systems Theory approach to comparing international newspaper coverage online

This study looks at news coverage of terrorist attacks on Twitter over a five-year period. It examines Twitter accounts of three US and three UK elite newspapers. This study found that terrorist attacks in core countries received more attention than attacks in non-core countries. Also, this study revealed that just three terrorist attacks: January and November 2015 Paris attacks and Brussels 2016 bombings, accounted for nearly a half of the overall US and UK tweets examined in this study

An appeal to shared values: framing and moral persuasion in the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ press releases

This study explores the confluence of moral reasoning and strategic framing in public relations tactics to address cultural variations in national policy debates. While much scholarly attention has been paid to the ways in which news media both represent and misrepresent U.S. Muslims through the ways stories are framed, much less work has been devoted to Muslim self-framing in public discourse, and its implications for public relations theory. To address this gap in understanding the ways some Muslim Americans use public relations as a tool of self-representation, this study examines more than 700 press releases issued by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) during the first year of the Donald Trump presidency. Using Moral Foundations Theory to operationalize the moral evaluations present in the frames, this study found four strategic frames: Islamophobia reactions, legal responses, public sphere engagement, and interfaith solidarity. It also examines the calls to action employed in the press releases. The findings show that the press release as a public relations tactic served as a critical venue for emphasizing individual rights and participation in public life through the deployment of moral language