Islamophobia and Online News: Elite News Discourse and Comments About the Daegu Mosque in South Korea

In 2023, dozens of Daegu residents protested the construction of a mosque outside of the gates of Kyungpook National University. This article analyzes the discourse of news stories and reader comments in order to understand how the elite news discourse was contested by the popular discourse of a largely far-right comments space. The elite discourse in the newspaper articles normalized institutional authority and the projection of the nation as a liberal democratic actor while the comments articulated common tropes within global Islamophobia while also being grounded in specific local politics and nationalist identity construction set against the Muslim Other.