*Yang Lai Fong & Md. Sidin Ahmad Ishak
Abstract:
This article reports the outcome of an analysis of how the Malaysian mainstream and alternative newspapers reported one of the most controversial religious problems encountered in Malaysia’s recent history—the Lina Joy’s religious conversion. Lina Joy’s decision to pursue changes to her National Registration Identity Card after renouncing Islam to become a Christian in 1990 sparked off complex legal procedures that attracted great attention from the media. By employing framing as the theoretical framework and content analysis as the research method, this study found that conflict was the most salient, important and enduring frame in all of the newspapers, regardless of mainstream or alternative.
Keywords: Framing analysis, inter-ethnic relations, multicultural communication, religious disputes, vernacular newspapers