Bowe wins Top Faculty Paper award at journalism conference

Brian Bowe, an assistant professor of journalism at Western Washington University, received the Top Faculty Paper award in the Religion and Media Interest Group of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He presented the paper at the annual conference in San Francisco in August. Bowe is the newest member of the faculty in the Department of Journalism. He comes to Western after completing his Ph.D. in Michigan State University’s Media and Information Studies Program.

The paper's description: "In recent years, attempts by Muslims in the U.S. to build worship spaces have been met with opposition during the local regulatory approval process. This article examines the discourse in the debate through a framing cluster analysis of news articles and editorials (n=349) from five U.S. newspapers between 2010-13. This research makes a theoretical contribution by being the first to use Moral Foundations Theory operationalize the moral evaluation dimension of framing. A cluster analysis of all the framing components revealed five frames: Local Regulation, Political Debate, Muslim Neighbors, Islamic Threat, and Legal Authority. A binary logistic regression found that moral evaluations were associated with mosque support, but not mosque opposition."