Introduction

The book starts with a general overview of media discourse and the importance of analysing media language, especially when it comes to the presentation of religions, in this case Islam. Other aspects that the chapter touches on are news values as the directives governing what gets published and why, some of the global thinking patterns, such as frames, which predetermine the way information is presented and the approaches to these presentations, known cumulatively as framing. This first chapter also presents the corpus used for the analysis at hand and the main analytical methods used: content analysis in terms of topics covered and references used to denote Muslims and the socio-cognitive critical discourse analysis applied in the analysis of metaphors and stereotypes. All these form the prerequisites for the study that follows and set its theoretical foundations.