Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Media Coverage Of Muslim Devotion: A Four-Country Analysis Of Newspaper Articles, 1996–2016, Erik Bleich, Julien Souffrant, Emily Stabler, A. Maurits Van Der Veen

Arts & Sciences Articles

Scholars have identified Muslims’ religiosity and faith practices, often believed to be more intense than those of other religious groups, as a point of friction in liberal democracies. We use computer-assisted methods of lexical sentiment analysis and collocation analysis to assess more than 800,000 articles between 1996 and 2016 in a range of British, American, Canadian, and Australian newspapers. We couple this approach with human coding of 100 randomly selected articles to investigate the tone of devotion-related themes when linked to Islam and Muslims. We show that articles touching on devotion are not as negative as articles about other aspects …