Sammendrag
This thesis is about the Innocence of Muslims controversy that took place in the autumn of 2012. A film trailer about the Islamic Prophet Mohammed was uploaded on the video-sharing site YouTube. The film lacked coherence, and depicted the prophet in offensive ways. In the course of months, the film went from being an unknown obscure film trailer with an amateurish look, into sparking a range of protests and demonstrations around the world. The conflict bore resemblances with the Rushdie affair from 1989 and the Mohammed cartoon crisis from 2005 and 2006, although some important features were different. I have conducted a content analysis of the online coverage of five different news media to find some journalistic tendencies in how the controversy is presented. The results showed that the journalistic tendencies were in line with general news coverage with a majority of mainly episodic framed articles and various main sources, although Western news media was dominating. However, I also found that the coverage offered a more nuanced and less polarizing presentation of the controversy than expected, and that the controversy did not resemble the Rushdie affair from 1989 and the Mohammed cartoon crisis from 2005 and 2006 as much after all.