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ABSTRACT Nationwide Newspaper Coverage of Islam Post-September 11, 2002: This study tracks newspaper coverage of Islam throughout the United States in a systematic cross-section national sample of 19 newspapers during the one-year period after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Using a community structure approach exploring links between city characteristics and coverage frames, all newspaper articles in the time frame of 500 words or more, yielding 325 articles, were coded for both issue “prominence” and “direction”, combined to yield a single score measure of issue “projection” -- Pollock’s Media Vector -- ranging from +.353 to - .156, with most (fourteen) cities revealing positive coverage. Pearson correlations and regression analysis yielded several significant “stakeholder” characteristics negatively correlated with favorable coverage of Islam. Contrary to expectations that a greater presence of foreigners, in particular Arabic or Farsi speakers, would be linked to appreciative perspectives, the higher the percentage of foreign-born citizens (r = -.539; p = .009) or number of Arabic/Farsi speakers (-.537; p = .011), the less favorable the coverage of Islam. In addition, a measure of capital investment -- the larger the number of high-rise buildings in a city – where “high rise” is defined as twelve stories or more, the less favorable the coverage of Islam (r = -.422; p = .036). Regression analysis yielded four variables accounting for 48% of the variance: number of Arabic/Farsi speakers (accounting for 29% of the variance), number of high-rise buildings in the city, percent Baptists and percent foreign-born citizens. Keywords: Islam, community structure approach, media vector Paper presented at the annual conference of the National Communication
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