The study “The Blasphemous Divide: News Media Coverage of Politics and Religion in the Philippines” by Jefferson Lyndon D. Ragragio from University of the Philippines Los Baños looked at the narratives of politics and religion in news articles in the Philippines.
The article examined how news outlets covered political exchanges between the national administration and the (Catholic) church in Philippines during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte (2016-2022).
It was based on a textual analysis of news articles from December 2015 to September 2021. The articles were manually selected with keywords such as religion, church, church and government, Duterte and God were typed in the search tab. There were a total of 227 articles from outlets such as Bulletin (58 reports), Inquirer (59 reports), Rappler (55 reports), and Star (55 reports).
The news stories could be divided roughly into three categories or broader narratives. The vast majority of the reports (168/227) focused on the church-related views and policies of the Duterte administration. Of these, 159 focused on the heated rhetoric of Duterte and his administration at Catholic priests, such as the claim that 90% of the priests are gay or the hateful remarks against the clergy that condemned the drug war.
The remaining nine of the 168 were about church-related pronouncements by national and local government units like the Philippine congress. These included pronouncements related to Covid-19 and an initiative seeking to start a reconciliatory dialogue between Duterte and the Catholic hierarchy.
The second category was covering the pro human-rights rhetoric of the Catholic church (36 reports). The Church’s stance was conveyed in response to the president’s verbal attacks. The third category (23 reports) was oppositional voices challenging the president’s anti-church rhetoric.
When looking at the narratives, they were “hypocritical church”, dealing with coverage of conflictual rhetoric against the church, “political church” dealing with Church’s political remarks including the anti-populist views, and “alternative voice”, mainstreaming the fringe political voices.
In conclusion, the article contributed to the scholarship about media populism: looking at how news media amplify as well as interrogate and withstand the rhetoric of populist politicians. The media acted not only as mediator but also as an equalizer. The two narratives, “hypocritical church” and “political church” characterize, as the author puts it, the zero-sum game between the two sources of political authority.
The coverage of politics and religion has implications for the understanding between journalism and democracy. In fragile democracies like the Philippines, it is not guaranteed that the media is free from populist capture.
The article “The Blasphemous Divide: News Media Coverage of Politics and Religion in the Philippines” by Jefferson Lyndon D. Ragragio is in Journalism Studies. (Free abstract).
Picture: Untitled by josue rosales
License Unsplash.
