Researchers, after reviewing over two and a half million news and reports in the US media, have shown that they are prejudiced against Muslims.
The warm welcome accorded to Ukrainian citizens by Americans and Europeans in 2022 is in stark contrast to the policies adopted in the mid-2010 for Syrian refugees that were unequal and often hostile.
Political scientist David Leighton has highlighted the role that religious identities play in this process. He noted in a recent interview that Syrian refugees were "mostly Muslims and faced more discrimination than would be the treatment of Ukrainian citizens, the majority of whom are of Christian heritage."
The media provides information that leads to the formation of such attitudes towards Muslims. A 2007 survey of Americans by the Pew Research Center found that negative perceptions of Muslims were largely influenced by what they heard and read in the media. Communications expert Muneeb Saleem and his colleagues have pointed out the link between media reports and "stereotypes, negative sentiments and harmful policies" in the case of Muslim citizens of the United States.
To better understand the evolution of media coverage of Muslims and Islam, we have traced the tone of thousands of articles written over the decades in our 2022 book, Corning Muslims: American Newspaper from a Comparative Perspective.
"Negative coverage of Muslims"
Previous research has pointed out that Muslims are widely portrayed in a negative light in the media. A review of research from 2000 to 2015 by communication scholars Saifuddin Ahmed and Jorge Mathis concluded that Muslims were negatively portrayed in the media and that Islam was often portrayed as a violent religion.
But the research they have reviewed has left out important questions that we review in our research.
The first question is whether the articles on Muslims and Islam were presented more negatively than the average newspaper article.
Second, is the portrayal of Muslims by the media more negative in terms of writings about other religious minorities?
If stories about minority religious groups only make headlines when they are involved in some form of conflict. In that case, they may be negative for reasons that are not specific to Muslims.
What did we find?
We used a media database to answer these questions. For example, Lexus Nexus, Nexus Uni, ProQuest and Factiva, so that they can download more than 256,000 articles that mentioned Muslims or Islam. To that end, we used the words "Muslim Articles" to search for articles published in 17 national and regional newspapers in the United States over a 21-year period from January 1, 1996 to December 31, 2016.
We've devised a reliable way to test the stories for their positives or negatives by comparing them with these 48,283 articles collected many newspapers on these topics without any specific sequence.
Importantly, this approach has provided us with the basis for additional comparisons. We collected articles from American newspapers about not only Muslims but also Catholics, Jews and Hindus, the three minority religious groups in the United States of various sizes and statuses. We then collected neumrios Muslim stories from newspapers in the UK, Canada and Australia.
The main point of our research is that an average article mentioning Muslims and Islam in the United States turned out to be more negative than 84% of the sample articles without our order. This means that it is possible for someone to read six articles in American newspapers to reach this one article, which is as negative as any average article about Muslims.
A review of articles about the world's major religions in 17 American newspapers over a 30-year period found that most of the articles on Islam were negative.
To make it clear how negative general articles about Muslims are, consider the following sentence, which has the same tone as the average article about Muslims: It had to be delivered. ' There are two very negative words in this sentence ('secret' and 'radical material') and it means that 'Muslim organization' has nefarious aims.
The articles in which Muslims are mentioned are more likely to be negative than the stories we have reviewed about any other group. The ratio of positive and negative subjects for Catholics, Jews and Hindus was around 50-50. In contrast, 80% of all articles on Muslims were negative.
This difference is very important. Our work shows that when the media writes about other minority religions it is not inclined to publish negative stories but when it writes about Muslims it is more likely to do so. Is.
Beyond comparing the groups to be covered, we were also interested in coverage in different countries. Perhaps America is unique in its extremely negative coverage of Muslims
To find out, we collected 528,444 articles about Muslims or Islam from various newspapers in the UK, Canada and Australia over the same period. We found that the ratio of negative to positive subjects in these countries was almost the same as in the United States.
Numerous scholars have pointed out that negative stories create unfavorable attitudes towards Muslims. Another study looking at the effects of negative information about Muslims also found an increase in support for policies that harm Muslims. For example, covert surveillance of Muslim Americans or drone strikes in Muslim countries.
Furthermore, a survey of young American Muslims found that negative media coverage weakened their identity as American citizens and the US government's confidence in them. We believe that the systematic recognition of negativity in the media coverage of Muslims and Islam and the need to address this issue is essential to avoid widespread stigma. This could lead to more opportunities for humane policies that are fair to everyone, regardless of faith.
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