Media and the Muslims : A thesis on media framing & priming in Argentina

Sammanfattning: All over the western world, media are giving Muslims the role as scapegoats for everything that is wrong with society. Through grave generalizations as well as alleged connections between Islam and terrorism, social categorizations are established in which Muslims become the ‘others’. Research has been made on a various amount of western nations, with the exception of a few, and this thesis explores how Argentinean media portray Islam and Muslims. With the use of quantitative and qualitative text analyses, the result will show the levels of priming and framing in relation to earlier research. By assuming social constructivism, a high frequency of these two ‘faces of power’ would affect societal relations, possibly creating a gap between an ‘us’ and ‘them’. Our findings suggest, however, this is not the case in Argentina; on the contrary, Argentinean media lack the frames which make Muslims ‘others’. This important discovery implies that the relationship between Islam and the West of today does not necessarily have to be one of two combatants, incapable of coexisting.