Religious conflicts in today’s mass media in Romania – framing the sacred issues in a profane code

Since the early years of post-communism, ethnic conflicts and religious intolerance have reached the intergovernmental fora, which issued numerous warnings about breaches in the freedom of religion in our country. This paper aims to investigate - through content analysis - how current conflicts and the intolerance of followers of different religions in Romania are framed by the press. Researching the media content reporting on interconfessional conflicts in Romania started from the premise that not only in history but also in the media, the imaginary intervenes permanently in order to legitimize the present by deforming and reinterpreting the past. Political or religious myths, widely used by communist propaganda make their presence felt in today’s society with all their symbolic charge (Boia, 1997; Girardet, 1997). Addressing interfaith conflicts is a mythological enterprise for the press, which thus becomes, paradoxically, dependent on a discursive model practiced by the religious institutions. Our study highlights the many myths circulated by the media in reporting on religious conflict. If we consider the mythical side, inherent to the belief in the supernatural and, thus, to religion, then we understand that the religious, mythological discourse, draws its substance from the collective imagination, in which the images focus on the evil and have a corresponding positive counter-image.