From Delegitimisation to Conditional Legitimacy: Media Slant and Multimodal Framing of Quran-Burning Protests

This article presents a multimodal framing analysis of media coverage of protests following Quran burnings by far-right activists in Sweden and the Netherlands. Rather than focusing narrowly on anti-Muslim bias, the study examines how centre-left and right-leaning news outlets construct the legitimacy or illegitimacy of these protests. Drawing on framing theory and social semiotics, we developed a codebook to analyse how textual and visual elements recontextualise the events and participants. The dataset comprises 53 articles and 107 images from The Guardian, BBC, Fox News, and Daily Mail published between January and December 2023. Results show distinct patterns with left-leaning news typically framing the protests as peaceful and episodic, offering conditional legitimacy through sanitised portrayals that foregrounded civility and individual expression while downplaying more confrontational or collective forms of dissent. In contrast, right-leaning reports represented the protesters as homogenous, aggressive, and disruptive—at times co-opting liberal values—to cast them as culturally regressive and oppositional. This article highlights the role of media framing in (re)defining what is made visible, who is given voice, and on what terms, while negotiating the fragile balance between freedom of expression and respect for religious identity in multicultural societies.