Allah Versus God! Influences Of News Reporting On Contents

Reporting on sensitive or controversial issues, particularly race and religion, has always been challenging for media practitioners. With a plural society background like Malaysia has, the media practitioners have to put more concern in the contents of their news reports. The consideration includes journalists as individuals, media routines, organisation, extra media forces to the ideological, sociocultural forces as presented in the Hierarchy of Influence model by Shoemaker & Reese (2014). The paper aims to study how the Malaysian mainstream media report on controversial issues in the newspapers from the hierarchy of influence perspective. Through a qualitative method, in-depth interviews were conducted among editors and journalists from The Star and Utusan Malaysia to obtain their experience in reporting such issues. Their responses were then analysed using Nvivo through the categorization of themes from the hierarchy of influences. The results show that there are connections between all levels that contributed to the shaping of news contents particularly on controversial issues like the translation of the word ‘God’ to ‘Allah’ case. This shows that Malaysia is unique and different when reporting on such issues as these influences will help to keep and maintain the peace and harmony in the plural society.