Islamophobia in the media refers to negative coverage of Islam-related topics, Muslims, or Arabs by media outlets in a way that is hostile, untrue, and/or misleading. Islamophobia is defined as "Intense dislike or fear of Islam, especially as a political force; hostility or prejudice towards Muslims",See also:
and the study of how and to what extent the media furthers Islamophobia has been the subject of much academic and political discussion.
Discussion of Islamophobia in the media is typically concerned with patterns of rhetoric employed either by a specific outlet or by the mass media of a particular country or area, such as the United States or Europe. Examples of this include disproportionate negative coverage of Islam compared to other religions, association of all Muslims with terrorism, portrayal of Islam and its adherents as violent or primitive, and exclusion of Muslim perspectives from political and academic discussion, among other topics. In turn, responses to discussions of media Islamophobia often question the frequency, severity, and impact of rhetoric deemed Islamophobic, what constitutes Islamophobia in practice, and the political motivations behind discussions about Islamophobia.
Historical context Some researchers point to the Iranian Revolution in 1979 as a starting point for Islamophobia in the United States . It may be due to the growing influence of political Islam around the same period. In his book, The Modern Middle East, author Mehran Kamrava notes that the "rise in the popularity and spread of political Islam can be traced to the 1980s and even earlier, when a general trend in the politicization of Islam began sweeping across the Middle East following the Arab 'victory' in the 1973 War and the success of the Iranian revolution." Others find Islamophobia present in the United States far earlier. Some also believe that the phenomenon of Islamophobia is a psychological defense mechanism, which is spreading through mass media like a virus. Regardless, negative media images of Muslims in the 1980s and 1990s were compounded by reporting on Islam and Muslims that relied on Samuel Huntington's 1993 idea of a "clash of civilizations" for their framework; one that "the American media were all too ready to embrace after the fall of Communism in the late 1990s."
Islamophobia in the media According to Nathan Lean, editor-in-chief of Aslan Media and a researcher at Georgetown University, the media plays a major role in promoting Islamophobia across the world. According to Elizabeth Poole in the Encyclopedia of Race and Ethnic Studies, the media has been criticized for perpetrating Islamophobia. She cites a case study examining a sample of articles in the British press from between 1994 and 2000, which concluded that Muslim viewpoints were underrepresented and that issues involving Muslims usually depicted them in a negative light. Such portrayals, according to Poole, include the depiction of Islam and Muslims as a threat to Western security and values.Poole, E. (2003) p. 217 Benn and Jawad write that hostility towards Islam and Muslims are "closely linked to media portrayals of Islam as barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist."Benn; Jawad (2004) p. 165
There have been various instances in the media about how the Muslim community are often misrepresented to society, mostly in a way that centers heavily on terrorism, and paints Islam with a very broad brush. A 2011 study claims this is something that is seen in two major magazines, Newsweek and Time, which have been covering relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan over the previous decade. Both of these publications distributed twenty leading articles that depicted about 57% of negative coverage in regards to current events in Afghanistan, about 37% neutral coverage, and only around 6% was positive information. This negative content would often consist of excessive mentioning of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, mistreatment of women, the recruitment of terrorists, etc. Numerous studies confirmed that the frequent repetition of a fact people might be convinced of it even if it is wrong, and this is called Illusory truth effect.
A 2014 study has shown that over three-quarters of people in Western societies rely on the mass media, mainly television, as their primary source of information about Islam and Muslims.
In 2018, The Washington Post completed a study to examine newspapers’ coverage of Muslims compared to Catholics, Jews, and Hindus. The study first established a baseline for neutrality by analyzing 48,000 newspapers from various US newspapers between 1996 and 2015. Next the study analyzed 850,000 articles of which about 28% mentioned “Muslim” or “Islam”, about 41% that mentioned “Catholic”, about 29% that mentioned “Jew”, and about 2% that mentioned “Hindu”. This study found that 78% of all the articles that mentioned “Muslim” or “Islam” were negative in comparison ”with only 40 percent of those about Catholics, 46 percent about Jews, and 49 percent about Hindus.” The study further filtered the content by cross referencing with articles that included “terrorism,” “extremism,” “radicalism,” “fundamentalism,” or “fanaticism,” “or their variants”. This revealed articles that contain terrorism and extremism words are more negative than those that do not. However, 69% of articles that do not contain references to terrorism and extremism were still negative. When the study removed articles with a mention of a foreign country “54 percent are negative, compared with only 37 percent of articles about Catholics, 36 percent of articles about Jews, and only 29 percent of articles about Hindus under similar conditions”.
British scholars Egorova and Tudor cite European researchers in suggesting that expressions used in the media such as "Islamic terrorism", "Islamic bombs" and "violent Islam" while not using the same terms relating to non-Muslims have resulted in a negative perception of Islam.See Egorova; Tudor (2003) pp. 2–3, which cites the conclusions of Marquina and Rebolledo in: "A. Marquina, V. G. Rebolledo, 'The Dialogue between the European Union and the Islamic World' in Interreligious Dialogues: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Annals of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, v. 24, no. 10, Austria, 2000, pp. 166–8. "
There have also been examples in the film industry in which Muslims are often associated with terrorism, such as in the 1998 movie The Siege. Some critics of this movie have stated that the manner in which Islam is portrayed in this film only furthers the stereotype that Muslims in are correlated with terrorism and savagery.
United States According to a 2021 analysis, media "coverage of Muslims is strikingly negative by every comparative measure examined. Muslim articles are negative relative to those touching on Catholics, Jews, or Hindus, and to those mentioning marginalized groups within the United States as diverse as African Americans, Latinos, Mormons, and atheists."
In 2011, the Center for American Progress published Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America."Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America". The goal of the report was to expose the organizations, scholars, pundits and activists that comprised a network dedicated to the spread of misinformation and propaganda about American Muslims and Islam. The report found that seven charitable foundations spent $42.6 million between 2001 and 2009 to support the spread of anti-Muslim rhetoric. The efforts of a small cadre of funders and misinformation experts were amplified by an echo chamber of the religious right, conservative media, grassroots organizations, and politicians who sought to introduce a fringe perspective on American Muslims into the public discourse. A 2010 Gallup poll has even revealed that about 43% of Americans reported feeling some type of prejudice against Muslims, while the religious group itself makes up one of the smallest populations in the entire country. This indicates that individuals have developed strong opinions about this group of people based on what has been heavily displayed by the media, which has often shown to be negative information.
A report from the University of California Berkeley and the Council on American–Islamic Relations estimated that was funded to 33 groups whose primary purpose was "to promote prejudice against, or hatred of, Islam and Muslims" in the United States between 2008 and 2013, with a total of 74 groups contributing to Islamophobia in the United States during that period. This has been referred to as the "Islamophobia industry" by scholars Nathan Lean and John Esposito.
Fox News In 2014, Vox Media editor Max Fisher said that Fox News is only a small component of the Islamophobia on U.S media. In 2015, Fox News issued an apology for and correction of false claims that formal "no-go zones" existed in England and France, where government had ceded control to Muslims. In 2009, Dr Fred Vultee released an analysis of Fox News which sought to explore the media outlet's practices through the prism of Edward Said's concept of Orientalism; the practices "create an ideological clearinghouse for a uniquely menacing image of Islam." This image is one of a rational, progressive West at constant and irreconcilable odds with an irrational, backward East. In his study, Vultee asserts, "The discourse Fox creates with its audience helps to set a foundation for polarized commentary and to legitimize support for a limitless war on the unknown." As part of his investigation, Vultee analyzed the contents of foxnews.com from 2007 to 2009. According to his research: A visit any day to the website of the Fox News Channel is likely to offer yet another piece of a sinister puzzle: the looming threat of Islam to everything the West holds dear. There is an armed threat, of course, in Afghanistan and Iraq and possibly as near as the shopping mall. But there is also a cultural danger that menaces all of Europe, that stalks coffee shops and classrooms, that endangers individual children and entire health-care systems with its irreducible demands, that hates Barbie and Valentine's Day and even the Three Little Pigs. And even as the West watches, they have overtaken us as the world's largest religion.
Fox News does not necessarily create the pieces of this puzzle. Much of their content and coverage comes from the Associated Press or is attributed to one of the newspapers belonging to the British arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp—The Times, The Sun and The Sunday Times. "What Fox does is act as a collator—a clearinghouse of unrelated and often quite unremarkable developments that, taken together, create a clear ideological dialogue with its audience about how to relate to and interpret the Islamic world."
In the February 2014 issue of the International Communication Gazette, Dr Christine Ogan and her colleagues published an article, "The rise of anti-Muslim prejudice: Media and Islamophobia in Europe and the United States." In their analysis of various polling data, the researchers note: Empirical evidence for such a possible interaction between media coverage and latent anti-Muslim feelings is mounting. One study that analyzed Fox News viewers' anti-Muslim feelings reported, for example, that 60% of Republicans who most trusted Fox News also believe that Muslims were attempting to establish Sharia law in the United States. And as we reported earlier, those trusting Fox News the most also tend to believe that Islamic values are incompatible with American values (68%). That percentage is lower for those who most trust CNN (37%) or public television/new [media] (37%). The researchers further claimed that: