New research: media trying with LDS stories
 
By Joel Campbell
Mormon Times - Salt Lake City, Utah
 
New research on Mormons and media show that media are making attempts to distinguish between FLDS and LDS. Other research shows the polarization that often occurs in Utah media over controversial issues, in this case the cancellation of the movie "Brokeback Mountain" in some Utah theaters in 2006.

A new study of newspaper coverage after the FLDS raid in Texas shows that of the 145 Spanish- and English-language articles from U.S. and international newspapers, just more than half explicitly distinguished between the LDS and FLDS, about 44 percent implicitly distinguished between the two churches and one article confused the two.

Writing in Dialogue, researchers Ryan T. Cragun and Michael Nielsen conclude with this statement:

"This paper detailed the two definitions of the label 'Mormon' used by the media. Until an alternative label for religions that trace their ancestry back to Joseph Smith is proposed and widely accepted, it is likely that the label 'Mormon' will continue to be used to refer to all such groups. While introducing a small amount of confusion for the uninformed reader, the use of that label does reflect the reality of a shared history and many shared beliefs. Despite the efforts of the LDS Church to claim 'Mormon' as its own, the fight over 'Mormon' will continue for the foreseeable future."

Utah State University researchers Brenda Cooper & Edward C. "Ted" Pease looked at the op-ed columns and letters to the editor in Utah newspapers during the debate of the 2006 cancellation of "Brokeback Mountain" in some Utah theaters.

They write in the Western Journal of Communication (There is no free copy available on the Internet):

"Our study interrogates journalists' and citizen letter-writers' discourse on either side of the issue as it played out in the press.

The discourse breaks down into two diametrically opposed frames -- Defending Zion versus Disrupting Zion -- but each argues for the same thing: to protect different perspectives of morality. The values underlying each framing strategy reveal tensions in an LDS Church-dominated culture with a growing 'Gentile' population."

The title of the paper is "The Mormons Versus the 'Armies of Satan': Competing Frames of Morality in the 'Brokeback Mountain' Controversy in Utah Newspapers. "

Cooper and Pease conclude:

"This was one skirmish in an ongoing culture and morality war across the changing societal and demographic landscape that is never far from the surface in Utah. These conflicts also extend nationwide, not only in the same-sex marriage debate, but on broader issues of equality and individual rights for sexual minorities. The role of the mass media in these conversations is central to the health of an informed and participatory democracy. But when the public marketplace of ideas turns from reasoned debate and responsible give-and-take to absolutist, take-no-prisoners conflict, public understanding of social issues falters."

BYU Theatre and Media Arts assistant professor Megan Sanborn Jones has published a book that examines how melodrama was used in the late 19th century to portray Mormons. In the book, "Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama," Jones reveals how anti-Mormon melodramas created a space for audiences to imagine a unified American identity.

The abstract reads:

"In the late nineteenth century, melodramas were spectacular entertainment for Americans. They were also a key forum in which elements of American culture were represented, contested, and inverted. This book focuses specifically on the construction of the Mormon villain as rapist, murderer, and Turk in anti-Mormon melodramas. These melodramas illustrated a particularly religious world-view that dominated American life and promoted the sexually conservative ideals of the cult of true womanhood. They also examined the limits of honorable violence, and suggested the whiteness of national ethnicity. "

While not necessarily media related but related to society's 19th-century view of Mormons, a new Virginia Law Review article examines "Marriage & Redemption: Mormon Polygamy in the Congressional Imagination, 1862-1887."

The abstract reads:

"How did nineteenth-century federal legislators imagine Mormon polygamy as they debated and adopted harsh anti-polygamy enforcement laws? Republican anti-polygamists in the Reconstruction era called polygamy and slavery the 'twin relics of barbarism,' analogizing polygamous husbands to Southern slaveholders. By the 1880s anti-polygamists in Congress rooted their arguments in Chinese Exclusionism and avoided divisive references to Southern slavery. They compared Mormon polygamy to 'despotic' cultural practices popularly associated with Chinese immigrants, like concubinage, prostitution, and 'coolieism.' White cultural nationalism mobilized support for the first effective anti-polygamy statutes in 1882 and 1887."

E-mail: foiguy@gmail.com
 
MormonTimes.com
Originally published Wednesday, May 20, 2009
 
Back