By: Michael Petersen
The conference room may have loomed large over the 30 spectators of the Brigham Young University Mormon Media Studies Symposium on Friday, but the evaluation of the Mormon question in U.S. politics drew the audience into the study.
Craig Foster, family history consultant and author of various books studying Mormonism in U.S. politics, documented the media’s manipulation of Republican Party presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s Mormonism in his paper titled “Mitt Romney and the Media’s Shaping of the Mormon Question.”
Foster, of Salt Lake City, Utah, concluded that despite the media’s negative spin on Romney’s membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his campaign positively affected the Church.
“Overall Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has been a positive experience for Latter-day Saints and has perhaps helped break down some of the negative stereotypes and concerns about the so-called Mormon question,” Foster said.
The Mormon question is whether or not a Mormon can be trusted as president of the United States, Foster said.
Foster cited Jordan Bloom, associate editor at The American Conservative, who said that entire news outlets reveal their political bias and appeal to specific political parties. MSNBC for Democrats; Fox News for Republicans. Foster connected this division to the polarization and divorce of Americans from Americans.
Foster addressed the media connection between The Church and cults. He said though news outlets did not explicitly call The Church a cult, they quoted how some Evangelical congregations did.
“Framing theory suggests that merely bringing up a concept activates knowledge pathways, much as it is potentially impossible to not think of an octopus when some one says, ‘Don’t think of an octopus,’” Foster said.
Other tactics used by the media included portraying Mormons as un-Christian and bringing up easily misunderstood Church doctrine or history.
One political ad, since acknowledged as out of form, closed with the words “Mitt Romney. Not one of us.”
“In the words of Daniel C. Petersen, about the Mormon moment in this past Wednesday’s New York Times article, many Mormons see this as a kind of arrival on the American scene,” Foster said
