Reporting Islam in Non-Western Newspapers: A News Framing Analysis

The media attention to Islam has increased over the past few decades, but meeting the quality standards in reporting the region is of great concern. This is because the media tend to highlight prejudice in news reporting of Islam. Therefore, this study aims to explore how non-western newspapers frame Islam in news reporting. Using purposive sampling, Punch and Vanguard were chosen from Nigeria while The Star and New Straits Times were chosen from Malaysia based on their popularity and readership. A total of 599 news articles focusing on Islam or Muslims were collected from the selected newspapers using an internet-based search from November 2015 until September 2016. These news articles were subjected to content analysis to explore how Islam is framed in the selected newspapers. The findings showed that more than one-third (41.6%) of the overall Islam-related articles reported Islam using human interest frames and more than one-third (38.1%) of the articles used conflict frames. Further analysis of the findings revealed that Nigerian newspapers used more conflict frames (48.9%) in reporting Islam compared to Malaysian newspapers (30.4%). It was envisaged that the findings of this study would advance our understanding of how non-western media frame Islam in news reporting.