Religion and the importance of media framing: The Romanian national cathedral in the secular press

Even though Romania is a predominantly Orthodox country, the construction of the National Cathedral – a symbolic edifice of the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC), has sparked numerous pro and con discussions in Romanian society, with strong echoes in the mass media. Therefore, this study analyzes how the Romanian online secular media portrayed the National Cathedral, examining the news frames used in the articles about the iconic edifice of the ROC. A news frame analysis and quantitative content analysis were applied to a corpus of 311 articles published between 2008 and 2021 by media outlets with high brand trust. A deductive approach was used to analyze the corpus based on five pre-defined frames: conflict, human interest, responsibility, morality, and economic consequences (Semetko and Valkelburg, 2000). The research shows that the secular press in Romania presented the subject of the National Cathedral, focusing primarily on the financial aspects and those related to various conflicts, neglecting the religious aspects. The results highlight that the articles that do not mention the financial aspect in the title or introduction tend to follow a writing pattern where this aspect is discussed later in the text. The study’s findings offer a valuable contribution to the academic understanding of how the media covers religious constructions, with a focus on the National Cathedral. The research sheds light on the potential for biased media coverage to create negative/positive attitudes towards religious institutions.