Coverage of Islam in the Western Press: Exploring Episodic and Thematic Frames
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study is primarily a quantitative content analysis that attempts to explore episodic as well as thematic frames related to Islam and Muslims in the Guardian (UK), the Washington Post (USA), the Australian (Australia) and the National Post (Canada). The research aims to find out the extent and nature of the coverage of episodic and thematic frames in the selected newspapers on Islam and Muslims. The study also aims to explore the tone of coverage of the Western political leaders about Islam and Muslims in the selected newspapers. Drawing on framing theory and Said’s Orientalism/Occidentalism, this study found out that overall the coverage had more negative frames used for Islam and Muslims. Most of the stories were on Stereotypes/Prejudices/fundamentalism followed by Racism/Religious frame. Western newspapers have racial and stereotypical predispositions towards Islam and its adherents. Furthermore, Islam was framed more often as threatful and intolerant religion. It was also found out that in all the selected newspapers, coverage of the Western politicians was more harsh and negative than positive towards Islam and Muslims.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".