A Comparative Study of the News Coverage of Hijab Removal in the News Media

News media play an important role in attitudes towards various issues, including wearing hijab and its removal. As a result, this paper aimed to compare the news coverage of hijab removal in the news media.

This study was applied in terms of purpose and quantitative in terms of execution method. The research population was the hijab removal news in the news media of Entekhab (reformist), Fars (fundamentalist), Khabar Online (moderate), BBC Persian Television (affiliated with the United Kingdom) and Voice of America (affiliated with the United states of America) during 2017 and 2018, which were selected through the total population sampling method. The research tool was to observe and record the news of the hijab removal in Persian news media or the Persian section of foreign news media, and the face validity of the information was confirmed by the opinion of experts and its reliability was obtained 0.89 by the inter-coder agreement method. Finally, the data were analyzed with non-parametric chi-square test in SPSS-20.

Results showed that there was a significant difference between Entekhab, Fars, Khabar Online, BBC Persian Television and Voice of America in terms of amount of news, news style, news value, news source, news bias and news type (P<0.05). However, there was no significant difference between the five mentioned media in terms of the headline type (P>0.05). In other words, in terms of the amount of news about the hijab removal, Fars, Khabar Online, BBC Persian Television, Entekhab and Voice of America reported the most news. In terms of news style, Entekhab, Fars, Khabar Online and Voice of America used mostly news style and BBC Persian Television used mostly report style. Also, in terms of news value, Entekhab, BBC Persian Television and Voice of America used encountering value, Fars used the proximity value and Khabar Online used mostly two values of encountering and reputation. In terms of the news source, Entekhab and Fars used the media reporter’s source more, Khabar Online used the domestic news agencies more, BBC and Voice of America used the unknown source frequently. In addition, in terms of the news bias, Entekhab, Fars and Khabar Online used the bias of condemning the event, the BBC used the neutral bias and the Voice of America used the bias of sympathy and support for the event more frequently. In terms of the type of news, Entekhab, Fars and Voice of America mostly used the event-oriented type, and the Khabar Online and BBC Persian Television mostly used the process-oriented type. On the other hand, in terms of the type of headlines, Entekhab, Fars, Khabar Online, BBC Persian Television and Voice of America used more inferential headlines and there was no significant difference among them.

The results showed that BBC Persian Television and Voice of America had a more positive view on the phenomenon of hijab removal and mostly reported the news from unknown news sources. The results indicated that the aforementioned news media are harmful to families in terms of the phenomenon of hijab removal.