Edward Said's 1997 Covering Islam (Knopf Doubleday) argued that negative public opinion about Muslims is significantly shaped by media representations. Consciously echoing Said, Erik Bleich and A. Maurits van der Veen seek to quantitatively investigate Said’s more qualitative conclusions in Covering Muslims: American Newspapers in Comparative Perspective. Whereas previous studies identified the media’s elevation of certain presuppositions and characterizations (x), Bleich and van der Veen test to what extent stories about Muslims actually are negative in comparison to average media coverage, both in general and with respect to other comparable religious groups. They also look at how the bulk of “resoundingly negative” stories about Islam can be accounted for and whether negative coverage of Islam and Muslims is a unique or enduring feature of the US media landscape.
Bleich and van der Veen found convincing evidence that articles that mention Islam and Muslims are demonstrably more negative (13). They observe that “the average Muslim article is more negative than over 84% of [their] entire representative sample of [US] newspaper articles” (13, emphasis in original). To reach these conclusions, they analyzed a sample of 48,283 US newspaper articles over a 20-year period and used computer-assisted and corpus linguistics techniques to survey and examine a further 256,963 articles that “mention Muslims or Islam in 17 national and regional US newspapers over a 21-year-period” (11). This extensive and significantly representative sample allowed the authors to make comparisons across time, groups, countries, and topics, finding that the negativity bias holds true when compared to stories on comparable religious traditions and outgroups (chapter 3), has remained persistent and pervasive over time (chapter 4), and persists across Anglophone contexts like Great Britain, Canada, and Australia (chapter 5). Even coverage in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, though far less intense in negativity, still tends to be largely critical, with outliers of positivity in countries like Malaysia (chapter 5). When it comes to the US, Bleich and van der Veen found that while “newspapers cover Muslims differently depending on the geographic context in which the stories are set,” the coverage is still “strikingly negative by any comparative measure” (16). In other words, their research does little to challenge Said’s conclusions.
As Bleich and van der Veen suggest, the negativity that media consumers regularly read about Islam and Muslims is not necessarily part of “any grand plan” by media producers (141). Nevertheless, journalists, editors, publishers, and those who train them (journalism and communication schools, religion departments, professional guilds) should take note, especially when the authors express how “the media [act] as a key site of boundary-making” across the Global North, further associating Islam and Muslims with otherness, violence, and an inherent sense of conflict (142, 144). Although individual journalists, editors, commentators, and analysts may or may not be blamed, the norms, structures, expectations, and systems they have built help perpetuate negative images of Muslims and, as a result, contribute to dividing lines between “us” and “them” (146-147).
Bleich and van der Veen make a few helpful suggestions for how to ameliorate the worst forms of coverage. Above all, it is important that media producers question the “associations” and “frames” they utilize. While journalists are trained to “follow the facts,” it is also important they consider what narrative techniques are used to frame those facts, and whether some storytelling conventions carry with them predilections and biases (what they called “aversive racism,” 142). This might mean taking a different approach to story selection, relationships with sources, and norms of publishing (such as word choice, style guidelines, and editorial review). Furthermore, Bleich and van der Veen suggest journalists and editors should work hard to avoid easy clicks and instead invite readers into other kinds of stories, which are no less compelling as those traditionally associated with Islam and Muslims. This would mean shifting from “clash of civilizations” narratives toward increased coverage of Muslim domestic issues, Islamic arts and sciences, education, sport, education, economics, and interfaith cooperation (143, 145).
Bleich and van der Veen’s conclusions might also prompt an appraisal of media practices on a more granular level. What words are chosen to describe beliefs and customs or individuals and institutions? How might the words employed, or which are more conventional in popular coverage, be implicitly or explicitly connecting Muslims and Islam with foreign locales, conflict, or violence? By extension, what out-of-date style conventions need updating in order to better reflect recent scholarship on global Islam and Muslim communities across the globe? Might style guides be updated to avoid older spellings like “Koran” and the use of modifiers like “moderate,” “progressive,” or “extremist,” and to define contentious terms like jihad, Islamism, or hijab in a more thoughtful way? Moreover, and as Bleich and van der Veen suggest, should articles not only be reviewed for their word choices and stylistic conventions, but also for tone, giving thought to how the overall timbre of pieces (or broader coverage) might be (re)generating negative stereotypes and playing a part in an ongoing feedback loop between producer and consumer that further stigmatizes marginalized groups?
Addressing these questions will require journalists and editors to interrogate how news originates from decisions made in the newsroom, rather than solely by events from the outside. By prioritizing the process by which reporting is done, and not just the product, the media might better “limit the harmful effects of the deep and abiding negativity so commonly associated with Muslims and Islam” (17).
Revisiting reporting process, tone-checking stories, and mitigating the worst of media biases does not mean jettisoning long-held journalistic values or producing Pollyannish portraits of Islam and Muslims. Instead, it is a way to return to the essentials of quality, independent journalism: to follow the facts and seek to reflect the world as it is—in all its complexity and nuance—with balance, accuracy, and insight.
Ken Chitwood is a senior research fellow with the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
Ken Chitwood
Date Of Review:
July 25, 2023
