 |
| View of Boston as we drove into the city. |
Eight students from the Mercyhurst Communication Department and I traveled to Boston early Thursday morning and returned this evening.
All nine of us were selected to present our research at the Eastern Communication Association (ECA)'s 103rd Annual Conference.
Kelly, Lindsey and I were selected to present our research involving the portrayal of Muslims in international media.
Kelly, Lindsey and I were selected to present our research involving the portrayal of Muslims in international media.
As I've mentioned in a previous post, we have researched how Muslims are framed for more than a year and a half.
We looked at how news and opinion articles from NPR, Fox, CNN, New York Times, Al Jazeera and BBC frame Muslims and America together.
We collected articles from September 1, 2010 to September 30, 2011. This gave us a little over a year's worth of articles to analyze
We stored the articles into respective documents and then ran them through CATPAC, which is a content analysis software. This program gave us the 40 most unique and frequently occurring words and graphed which of those words showed up together. From here, we went back into the articles and analyzed the context of the words.
Some of the results we found were surprising. Opinion articles were pretty much what we expected, but news articles threw us for a loop.
The two most surprising results were from Fox and CNN.
Fox articles that were strictly news framed Muslims in a way that made them human, rather than depict them as the enemy or terrorists. Since Fox is stereotypically a very conservative and "right" network, this is not what we expected.
On the other hand, CNN -- which is seen as neutral or sometimes a liberal network -- framed Muslims in a negative way.
Many people at the conference who told us they get a lot of their news from CNN were surprised by this. They discussed with us how we must be aware about what we are reading and not follow the media's information blindly. All of us must stand on our own two feet and do a little extra digging to really know what is going on in the world.
We also met faculty member Nick Bowman, Ph.D., from West Virginia University who told us he would love it if we could read over his research about how the death of Osama bin Laden was framed in newspapers. He explained that is it always good to find others doing the same types of research and having them look over your own, especially if the findings support each other's research.
I will definitely be looking at his blog and looking into his research on Osama bin Laden's death.
We looked at how news and opinion articles from NPR, Fox, CNN, New York Times, Al Jazeera and BBC frame Muslims and America together.
We collected articles from September 1, 2010 to September 30, 2011. This gave us a little over a year's worth of articles to analyze
We stored the articles into respective documents and then ran them through CATPAC, which is a content analysis software. This program gave us the 40 most unique and frequently occurring words and graphed which of those words showed up together. From here, we went back into the articles and analyzed the context of the words.
 |
| Standing with our poster before the presentation. |
Some of the results we found were surprising. Opinion articles were pretty much what we expected, but news articles threw us for a loop.
The two most surprising results were from Fox and CNN.
Fox articles that were strictly news framed Muslims in a way that made them human, rather than depict them as the enemy or terrorists. Since Fox is stereotypically a very conservative and "right" network, this is not what we expected.
On the other hand, CNN -- which is seen as neutral or sometimes a liberal network -- framed Muslims in a negative way.
Many people at the conference who told us they get a lot of their news from CNN were surprised by this. They discussed with us how we must be aware about what we are reading and not follow the media's information blindly. All of us must stand on our own two feet and do a little extra digging to really know what is going on in the world.
We also met faculty member Nick Bowman, Ph.D., from West Virginia University who told us he would love it if we could read over his research about how the death of Osama bin Laden was framed in newspapers. He explained that is it always good to find others doing the same types of research and having them look over your own, especially if the findings support each other's research.
I will definitely be looking at his blog and looking into his research on Osama bin Laden's death.
If you'd like to know more about our research on Muslims in international media, feel free to contact me and I will send you a copy of the paper (graphs and all, it's kind of fun to look at).
Don't hesitate to ask any questions you may have about the research as well. Do you have any thoughts or possibly disagree?
No comments:
Post a Comment