A Democratic Approach to Religion News

This chapter sets the scene for this book and introduces the reader to initial but useful contextual information. It outlines the proposed solution to the problem that this research identifies. It communicates the importance and relevance of the developed and utilised democratic approach to religion news and its four dimensions—spiritual, world life, political, and conflict—within the wider research and news industry landscape. It also provides the questions that frame the book. It finally outlines a map for the reader of the chapters that follow.

This chapter sets the ground and provides broader legitimacy for the proposed democratic approach to newspaper religion reporting and the questions this research seeks to answer. To this end, it explores three of the four-layer rationale for it. In the first layer, the attitude of democracy to the news media, civil society, and religion, I discuss leading twentieth-century models or ideal types of democracy and a few contemporary models or hybrid types of democracy, beginning with the model that assigns the most limited role to the news media and civil society, part of which is religion, and finishing with the most sophisticated model—monitory democracy for which I make a case. In each model’s review, I pay closer attention to its central tenets, the roles assigned to the news media, civil society, and religion. In the second layer, I examine the news media’s attitude to and roles in democracy. I complete the discussion of the wider framework for this research by considering the third layer or the attitude of religion and religious citizens to democracy.

In Chap. 3, I discuss the core of the four-layer rationale for the democratic approach or primarily the research on religion in the news. I begin by outlining the key arguments in the broader field of religion, media and culture, including their digital forms. The discussion of the prevalent approaches to religion and the media, including the news, identifies a need for a unified or shared general approach to religion and the news. I then consider the importance of news values and sociological factors in making general and religion news. The gap in the field of religion and the news that the detailed critical discussion of the literature identifies is that different types of research find common problematic issues or democratic bits, which, however, are dispersed across different studies and are not brought together in a systematic and unified approach. More importantly, all these different types of research and their findings are discussed in the broader context of democracy, democratic society and news media. Moreover, the suggested improvements are impossible without democracy and its decent functioning. The proposed four-dimension democratic approach—spiritual, world life, political, and conflict—and the posed empirical questions associated with it address precisely this gap in the field.

As this research significantly draws on its empirical part, Chap. 4 discusses why the author employs a combination of framing analysis and content analysis supplemented by a notable qualitative dimension to investigate religion overall, Christianity, and Islam in the British and Turkish press. It then presents the list of all the frames in the four meta-frames of the democratic approach: spiritual, world life, political, and conflict. It also considers the comparative research design and provides profiles of Britain and Turkey as a further context for the analysis and discussion of the findings. It finally explains all about sampling and coding: the newspaper selection, sampling techniques, timeframe, search query, sample size, and coding strategy.

In this study’s first empirical chapter, I provide and analyse quantitative data about the volume of coverage of religion overall, Christianity, and Islam in British and Turkish newspapers, including the differences between the sampled three distinct weeks. To further explain these findings, I also use the general variables of length, relevance, placement, type, main topics, and geography of main topics. Three findings stand out in this chapter. First, there was two and a half times more reporting of religion overall in Turkey than in the UK. Second, in both countries, the examined religious holidays led to a significant rise in the reporting of the home religion only. Third, unlike the dominant religions, which were predominantly covered through the prism of home news, the minority religions Islam in the UK and Christianity in Turkey were not reported as part of the home society in British and Turkish newspapers. I discuss all the findings in the context of both nations, making links to previous studies and key debates in the literature.

In this study’s second empirical chapter, I address the questions of to what extent the four dimensions of the democratic approach are employed and which of these dimensions are absent from British and Turkish newspapers. I provide and compare quantitative data and 87 qualitative examples about the meta-frames and frames of religion overall, Christianity, and Islam in British and Turkish newspapers. This combination of quantitative data and qualitative examples brings the richness and depth of the research findings to the fore. I highlight three key findings from the meta-frame analysis. First, British and Turkish newspapers demonstrated a contrasting attitude to the dominant and the minority religions. Second, in both countries, despite the contrasting framing of the minority religions, even the dominant religions had a disproportioned employment of the four meta-frames, or they did not receive recognition of the importance of faith, its values, and practices in everyday life for their followers. Third, the different patterns of religion coverage in the four meta-frames show the proposed democratic approach’s potential for recognising all views and values. I discuss and compare all the findings with previous research on religion in the news and journalism studies.

In Chap. 7, this study’s third empirical chapter, I provide quantitative data to address the question of who speaks for religion in general, Christianity, and Islam, and frames the four dimensions of the democratic approach, overall and in the three distinct weeks, in British and Turkish newspapers. Three findings are particularly noteworthy. First, I find contrasting sourcing patterns in the coverage of Christianity and Islam between British and Turkish newspapers, which can be seen in the different dominant voices in their reporting and in the contrasting geography of their sources. The prominence of political sources in the coverage of religion overall plays a central role in the shaping of these contrasting sourcing patterns. Second, I establish a clear correlation between sources and meta-frames that reinforces these contrasting pictures. Third, in both countries, the employment of the minority religious voices in the reporting of religion overall and their own faith is not conducive to the newspaper recognition of their values and to their participation in the wider democratic decision-making process. I discuss these findings in relation to the previous chapters and mainly other studies in the field.

In this concluding chapter, I first summarise the main arguments developed in the first part of this research. I then further unpack and situate the key findings within the broader field of enquiry. I also discuss the contribution and significance of this study and its findings to scholarship. The most important contribution is the development and proposal of the four-dimension democratic approach, which has enabled and illuminated, with all the empirical complexities, a systematic comparison of religion news coverage in the UK and Turkey. While I developed and proposed it deductively and inductively, the results also confirm its necessity and suggest that this democratic approach can achieve its purpose and contribute to more comprehensive and balanced reporting of religion. Therefore, I consider that this approach could serve as a democracy index or as a guide against which newspapers and possibly other news media can measure up their coverage of religion.