A democratic approach to religion news: Newspaper coverage of Christianity and Islam in the UK and Turkey

Abstract

This paper introduces and utilizes a systematic and unified four-dimension democratic approach to the study of newspaper religion reporting to examine the coverage of faith, particularly Christianity and Islam, in the British and Turkish national press. While the research employs a sample from 2014 and uses framing analysis through content analysis of 1,022 news articles supplemented by qualitative examples, this democratic approach crosses time and country boundaries. The findings reveal that, in both countries, alongside the contrasting portrayals of the minority religions, even the dominant religions had disproportioned employment of the four dimensions: spiritual, world life, political, and conflict. The spiritual dimension had limited use in both countries, particularly in the UK. There was significantly less employment of context for putting faith in action in the reporting of Christians in the world life dimension in the UK compared to the coverage of Muslims in Turkey. The results suggest a potential, though untested, application of this approach as a democracy index against which the press can improve its faith coverage. This study’s theoretical and methodological contribution to scholarship outweighs its empirical findings in the fields of religion in the news, comparative journalism studies, and empirical research on news media’s democratic performance.