The Muslim and the biased media: Proof

 IslamOnline.net–Doha

It’s well-known, but rarely acknowledged. Mainstream media thrives on the vilification of Muslims. Granted this reality and its adverse effects on the daily life of the average (and indeed ‘moderate’) Muslim, a recent research study conducted by academics at the Lancaster University is timely, to say the least. In ‘The representation of British Muslims in the British Press 1998 – 2009’, researchers analyzed over 200,000 media articles written on Islam and Muslim over the eleven year period. “This amounted to 143 million words of journalism which was analyzed by the team using computer software to search for and identify language patterns across the articles in order to give an idea of the most frequent ways that Muslims are written about.” The data for the study was sourced from broadsheets including The Business, The Guardian, The Independent and tabloids like The Daily Express, The People, Daily Star and The Sun.

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council - UK's largest organization for funding research on economic and social issues, with a total budget is £203 million for 2011/12 – the study’s most pertinent finding is the qualitative data which clearly indicates that the “dominant discourses on Islam and Muslims in the UK national press seem to revolve around issues of conflict” (Lead investigator, Paul Baker 2011), with a strong focus on Muslim women and Muslims with extreme positions. According to the study, “the team found that the majority of representations took care not to make over-generalizing statements about Muslims in an overtly negative way, although some tabloids did use headlines such as MUSLIMS TELL BRITISH: GO TO HELL! (Daily Express, November 4th, 2010), BBC PUT MUSLIMS BEFORE YOU! (The Star, October 18th, 2006), MUSLIM SCHOOLS BAN OUR CULTURE (Daily Express, February 20th, 2009).”

Analyzing the study, Engage – a non-profit company working towards enhancing the active engagement of British Muslim communities in politics, media and British national life – noted that the report demonstrates that reinforcement of media bias towards fringe groups is “at the expense of mainstream Muslims, and on word association with Islam and Muslims engendering negative connotations with the religion and its adherents” (Nov, 2011). The study itself is cognizant of this reality and notes, “when newspapers write about a minority group like Muslims, if they focus on a violent subset of that group, there is the danger that the majority suffer guilt by association.”

Facts, Figures, Findings

The report makes a careful analysis between overt and subtle forms of vilification, drawing attention to media houses which flourish on a ‘sensationalize and sell’ philosophy, and the other more dangerous form of between-the-lines vilification, which depends on word associations (like ‘terrorist’ and ‘Muslim’) which leave deeper imprints but go unnoticed to undiscerning minds.  

“More generally expressly negative, and at times vituperative, were a few columnists, especially in The Sun newspaper. For example, Julie Burchill (The Sun June 24th, 2009), on Muslim women who wear the veil wrote: ‘We let shroud-swishing zombies flout OUR standards of freedom and tolerance every day.’ Jeremy Clarkson (The Sun, June 30th, 2007) wrote: ‘the "Muslim community" was allowed to parade through London urging passers-by to blow up a skyscraper and behead the infidels’ and John Gaunt (The Sun June 20th, 2008) wrote ‘we wasted thousands in legal aid on silly little misguided Muslim girls to take schools to court for the right to dress like a Dalek in a full veil’. Yet, in the past, complaints about patently Islamophobic columnists to the Press Complaints Commission have resulted in the response: ‘The column clearly represented a named columnist’s personal view and would be seen as no more than his robust opinions’ – a defense that some newspapers and columnists have clearly exploited.”

“More common than the expressly negative representation of Muslims, was a more subtle set of implicitly negative representations, with Muslims often being ‘collectivized’ via homogenizing terms like ‘Muslim world’ and written about predominantly in contexts to do with conflict, terrorism and extremism. For example, collectively, when a British newspaper mentioned the word Muslim/Muslims an ‘extreme belief’ word like extremist or fanatic occurred next to it about 1 in 20 cases (proportionally, The Guardian wrote least about extremist Muslims only writing about them 1 in 36 times - at the opposite end of the spectrum The People had extremists as 1 in 8 examples of all mentions of Muslims).

Interestingly, however, the British press couldn’t decide for some time what to call Muslim extremists. Back in 1998 they were hardliners, although they had changed into fanatics by 2001. Militants took over between 2002-2006, slightly overlapping with the rise of radicals from 2004-2008. Starting in 2005, the press slowly settled on extremists. This is a general picture - individual newspapers had their favorite terms: The Times also used zealots while some of the red-tops sometimes opted for muppets, sheep, lowlife and cretins. Overall, references to extremist Muslims were much higher than to ‘moderate’ ones. For every one moderate Muslim mentioned, 21 examples of extremist Muslims are mentioned in the British press. It is also interesting to note that so-called ‘moderate Muslims’ often got praised in a way which implies they are good because they aren’t fully Muslim.”

Interestingly, the subject matter and principle findings of the report are not new. Research studies conducted on the same vein include  Cardiff University’s “Images of Islam in the UK: The Representation of British Muslims in the National Print News Media 2000-2008”  and the 2010 study “Media portrayals of religion and the secular sacred”. However, lending a unique credence to this study is its exhaustive nature – 200,000 articles, 143 million words. The Cardiff study for instance was sourced by “974 newspaper articles about British Muslims in the British Press from 2000 to 2008”.

Echoing the Lancaster study, the Cardiff report notes, “The language used about British Muslims reflects the negative or problematic contexts in which they tend to appear. Four of the five most common discourses used about Muslims in the British press associate Islam/Muslims with threats, problems or in opposition to dominant British values. So, for example, the idea that Islam is dangerous, backward or irrational is present in 26% of stories. By contrast, only 2% of stories contained the proposition that Muslims supported dominant moral values. Similarly, we found that the most common nouns used in relation to British Muslims were terrorist, extremist, Islamist, suicide bomber and militant, with very few positive nouns (such as ‘scholar’) used. The most common adjectives used were radical, fanatical, fundamentalist, extremist and militant. Indeed, references to radical Muslims outnumber references to moderate Muslims by 17 to one.”

Now what?

The question is instantaneous. What are the implications of this study? Granted that many studies have come and gone, how will this study translate into the betterment of a discriminated minority group?  Ideally such studies will inspire governing authorities to step in and regulate a wayward media. But as is history is the best teacher and history has taught us this is not be expected. An interesting take-home message emerges from the study - Muslims can initiate change through simple actions. The conversion of ‘Moslem’ to ‘Muslim’ is a case in point.

“The Daily Mail caused consistent and known offence by spelling Muslim as Moslem; up until 2003, The Mail and The Express regularly wrote about Moslems. The spelling has a pronunciation which sounds like the Arabic word for ‘oppressor’, and the Muslim Council wrote to both newspapers asking them to spell it Muslims in future. The Express complied, but The Daily Mail continued with Moslem for about a year after that, being the last newspaper to abandon the spelling. Where The Mail did occasionally write approvingly of Muslims it was when it played one social group off against another as in the story ‘Driven out by the Gay Mafia: Leading Scots Muslim forced to quit charity group after objections to his support for traditional family values’. (Daily Mail, June 15, 2006).”