Research Articles
Author: Diego Contreras (Facoltà di Comunicazione Sociale Istituzionale Pontificia Università della Santa Croce, Roma)
The Declaration ‘Dominus Iesus’ (2000) is one of the Vatican documents to have provoked most journalistic controversy in recent years. We may ask ourselves why a topic of apparently little journalistic interest, such as a theological document, raised so much furore. The analysis of this case can help to reveal how the mainstream press deal with religion; and may be useful for verifying some inherent features of journalistic formats, such as news values and the mechanisms of journalistic interpretation. From the analysis of the journalistic reception of the Declaration, one may draw certain conclusions about the possible influence that the ‘language’ and internal dynamics of the mass media exert on the journalistic presentation of complex content, such as that of a doctrinal Declaration. For this study, we have examined 150 journalistic texts from 68 newspapers and magazines from 15 countries.
Keywords: Relativism, Religion and News, News Values
How to Cite: Contreras, D. (2017) “Coverage of Complex Theoretical Content The Case of ‘Dominus Iesus’”, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. 4(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.72