Permitted to Build? Moral Foundations in Newspaper Framing of Mosque-Construction Controversies

Abstract

Recent proposals by American Muslims to build mosques have been met with technical and ideological opposition during the permitting process. This article examines the framing of these debates in newspaper stories between 2010 and 2013 to better understand the socially constructed position Muslims hold in American media and public spheres. Connecting framing and Moral Foundations Theory, this analysis identifies five frames: Local Regulation, Political Debate, Muslim Neighbors, Islamic Threat, and Legal Authority. These frames emphasized binding moral foundations related to in-group protection and deference to authority. A binary logistic regression found that moral evaluations were associated with mosque support, but not mosque opposition.

Night and Day

“…Table 1 displays the dispersion of the individual moral foundation components in each cluster. Based on a rule of interpretation proposed by Bowe (2014), components with means greater than 0.45 were considered primary frame components and components greater than 0.25 and less than 0.45 were considered secondary frame components.…”

How Do Moral Values and Crisis Response Strategies Influence Individuals’ Evaluations and Support of Sports Organizations Post-Crisis?

“…These five foundations include care, fairness, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Moral foundations have evolutionary roots and originally served humans to meet adaptive challenges (e.g., protection of children, building partnerships and coalitions) (Bowe, 2018;Graham et al, 2013). Today, moral foundations can serve to evaluate situations in everyday life, which include sports.…”

“…Given that sports have a moral component and fans can moralize sports crises, we argue that the moral outrage could also influence how they respond to the crisis and the sports organization. Existing literature has demonstrated that the use of moral foundations in message framing can significantly affect the general public's support of an organization or a cause (Bowe, 2018). In particular, Coombs and Tachkova (2019) suggested that when organizations respond to a crisis, moral recognition should be incorporated in their messages to create a foundation for recovery.…”

Women, start your engines: US and UK media portrayal of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia women driving ban

“…Framing theory focuses on how mass media frames its news and information and at the same time how people learn from the news and make sense of their social world (Baran and Davis, 2009). Framing is how journalists shape content -within a familiar frame of reference‖ (Gorp, 2007: 61) in a way that resonates with their audiences who also share the same frame of reference (Bowe, 2018). These frames include a shared culture and socially defined roles established within the society in which journalists and their publics live.…”