weltwoche, 28 february 2008
Last November the Mayor of London published a report c aloneed Finding Common Ground. The report surveyed press insurance coverage of Muslim issues and lambasted journalists for fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment.
The reports authors had chosen a hit-or-miss week in 2006 and analysed all newspaper denominations about Muslims. During that week there had been 352 articles on Muslim-related issues of which 91 per cent were deemed negative in their portrayal of Muslims and Islam, and only four per cent judged to be positive. This was evidence, the report claimed, of the demonisation of Muslims that was likely to provoke feelings of insecurity, suspicion and anxiety amongst non-Muslims and of vulnerability and mania amongst Muslims. The press, the report concluded, was Islamophobic to its core.
As with many other recent reports on Islamophobia, it payed to scratch beneath the surface of the rhetoric. According to the authors, they had picked a random week to assess press coverage. It just so happened that this was the week in which the British government published its report on the 7/7 bombings of the London underground.
Not surprisingly, there was a huge amount of press coverage, and not surprisingly nearly of it was negative; even the Mayor of London, I think, would have found it nasty to be positive about four British-born Muslims who had blown up themselves and 52 others a year earlier.
The authors of the report looked for articles that included the row Islam, Muslims, Islamic, Islamist, Sunni, Shia; they also looked for words such as radical, fundamentalist and extremist if the context was such that it was commonsense to assume that an association with Islam or Muslims would be made. So an article about an extremist al-Qaeda sympathizer would be deemed to be a negative story about Muslims, whether or not his spectral got a mention. The researchers also included articles where...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay
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