You need Trump as much as Trump says you do : En kvalitativ fallstudie av Donald Trumps relation till evangeliska ledare under presidentvalet 2016

Sammanfattning: The US presidential election of 2016 between the republican Donald Trump and the democrat Hillary Clinton was special in the aspect of the fierce tone between the two candidates, largely by personal attacks and how the media to a large extent focused on this rather than political issues. Many evangelical leaders decided to endorse Trump, even though their earlier outspoken criticism toward Trumps previously controversial statements about women, immigrants and minorities. In six articles this case study examines how the authors from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal frame the relationship between Trump and evangelical leaders during the 2016 US election. This is done by using a framing analysis and the categories: actors, characteristics, motives and goals which help me to answer a couple of analysis questions and latter put it into context of Snow and Benfords (1988) three tasks of framing. In this way I can answer the first research question: ”How is the relationship between Donald Trump and the evangelical leaders represented in the selected cases and how can this be understood by using Snow and Benfords (1988) three tasks of framing; diagnostic, prognostic and motivational framing?” The second research question “How can the framing of the relationship between Trump and the evangelical leaders be understood according to Hjarvards (2012) theory medialization of religion with a focus on media as language?” visualizes the attitudes and the shaping of frames contained in the articles. The study concludes that the three tasks of framing help assign causation, identify reasons, strategies and solutions to the phenomenon that is framed by the authors of the articles, but also how Trump and evangelicals are framed by the authors to rationalize the defined measures. The results show that the authors of the articles mainly focus on Trumps motives and goals to gain support of evangelical leaders vice versa the leaders which want to gain ground and influence the politics Trump is going to convey. This can be seen in both NYT and the WSJ articles through the framing of Trump and his fierce tone toward Clinton and her campaign. It is also recurrent that the authors of the article describe how Trump uses a language aimed at the Christian right and its leaders to promise them to pursue a value-conservative policy that favor them.