Page - 110 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

110 | Sakina Loukili www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 107–131 focused specifically on the mediation of religion and politicized Islam in the Scandinavian context15 provide a fruitful base for this study with re- gard to questions of how media and politics influence politicized and critical attitudes towards Islam. The authors suggest that news media and poli- tics work in tandem to influence a negative perception of Islam and that other media dynamics (social network media, for example) add to these representations. Thus, the politicization of Islam and the mediatization of religion are processes that mutually reinforce each other, which is taken as a starting point for this article. The research question that I will seek to answer is twofold: how can we understand the emergence of DENK and NIDA in the context of the domi- nant Dutch discourse on Islam in politics and public debate, and how and where does media come into play? This article consists of two parts. In the first part, I will provide some background on the emergence of DENK and NIDA in politics and how they relate to broader ongoing public debates around Islam and Muslims in the Netherlands. For this, I will make use of newspaper articles I have selected through LexisNexis, a database of all Dutch newspapers which allows the user to search for specific terms or time periods. I made a broad selec- tion of newspaper articles using the keywords “DENK” and “NIDA” and nar- rowed down my search results to articles that refer to media material and articles that specifically discuss media use. I also draw on two qualitative semi-structured interviews I conducted in 2020 with a NIDA politician and a DENK politician in which themes such as the public debate about Islam and social media were discussed in relative depth. In the second part, I introduce the concept of “third spaces” in regards to social media and consider how it might be useful for analyzing and un- derstanding DENK and NIDA in their relation to media. Then, I highlight some cases of mainstream media framing of DENK and NIDA and cases that highlight their distrust of mainstream media.16 Finally, I will discuss some ways in which the parties themselves use social media to resist dominant narratives on Islam in Dutch politics and society. For this part of the article, I have again used the LexisNexis database, this time selecting articles from 15 Lundby/Hjarvard/Lövheim/Jernsletten 2017. 16 Media framing here is understood in terms of Gamson/Modigliani 1987’s conceptualiza- tion of a media frame as a “central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events” (143).