Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Religion And Topoi In The News: An Analysis Of The “Unsecular Media” Hypothesis, Rick Clifton Moore

Communication Faculty Publications and Presentations

Mark Silk has proposed in Unsecular Media that journalists operate with a limited series of topoi and that these are borrowed from religion. Silk thus claims when journalists write about religion, they do so in a way that ultimately supports religious values. In this study, I apply topic analysis to recent news coverage of Jesse Jackson’s marital infidelity to determine the extent to which the topos of hypocrisy was employed and whether this employment supported or challenged a religious (as opposed to secular) worldview.