Media and Islam

“Mis-information is not like a plumbing problem you fix. It is a social condition, like crime, that you must constantly monitor and adjust to” (Tom Rosenstiel)

Media being the main source of information globally makes it a powerful tool, and I will not hold to exaggerate it as a powerful weapon. Looking at the events in history we can clearly see how media (such as newspapers, radio and television) had been used to achieve the interests of those in power to mislead people. One of the things that the media used was religion in misleading people. Religion is the most easily exploited as it is based on faith and beliefs that shapes the rules of that religion. A group of people following a religion may believe in the same faith and set of beliefs but they practice it differently.

I am addressing Islam as an example for it. Though all the Muslims are supposed to not lie, be kind and humble, protect their modesty and be truthful etc., however, not all Muslims live by these guidelines though all of them do believe in the oneness of Allah and that Muhammad (P.B.U.H) is their last Prophet. To put it simply, there are different ways that PEOPLE make up of practicing the same faith they share with millions of believers of the same religion and so it is easier to manipulate them as well.

Media is a good source of information and can be used to create a great influence globally. But there is no doubt that media is a powerful tool that outcasted Islam not only as a religion but as an identity by releasing misinformation and disinformation leading to the horrific consequences of Islamophobia and security concerns for Muslims around the world

Caroline Mala Corbin, in her essay, “Terrorists Are Always Muslim but Never White, at the Intersection of Critical Race Theory and Propaganda” addresses the topic of Terrorist Incitement(the criminal acts committed by individuals or groups who are or associated with designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations) on the Internet and argues that the picture media shows of a specific religion is based on critical race theory and propaganda. (Corbin) Articles and News channels release news that are 99 percent focused on Muslims’ portrayal as terrorists. Now here we are focusing on the role that the media served in relation to Islam. Though not all the news and articles are about Islam, the majority of those that do have a mention of Islam are all about their relatedness to terrorism and extremism. Muslims and Arabs are portrayed as dangerous and uncivilized people. Although most of the Arabs in the United States are not Muslims, and Arabs and Muslims are not interchangeable terms but nevertheless, terrorists are regularly associated with a racialized group now labeled MUSLIM, which includes Muslims along with those who appear Arab or Middle Eastern. This label Muslims as terrorists in the society. (Von Sikorski, Matthes, & Schmuck)The depiction of Muslims in the media is surprisingly limited. When a detailed analysis was done over 900 movies it concluded the role of Muslims and Arabs in them as terrorists or as some other villain character. (Semmerling, 2006) An analysis after 9/11 of the United States film industry shows the entrenchment of stereotypes against Muslims, as Arabs and Muslims are almost totally represented as terrorists or other bad characters instead of normal people with friends and family. (Tehranian) Islam as a religion of terror is the stereotype that existed and nurtured in the States even before 9/11 which majority of people considered the reason for categorizing them as terrorists. A publication in 1999 showed how Muslims were mistreated in America because they practice Islam or simply because they belong to the religion Islam. (Suleiman) Here if we do notice 9/11 happened in 2001 and it’s a publication before that, so definitely only 9/11 can’t be the reason for Islamophobic behavior. The ABC News in their article shared the pictures of how 20 years after 9/11, Islamophobia still continues to haunt Muslims. (Alfonseca)

_{Post-9/11 Islamophobia due to misinformation of Media}

Apart from this, another outcome of this stereotype was the destabilization of security instead of improving it. It jeopardized the security of American Muslims. The keen focus on Muslims as the source of all these terrorist activities resulted in security blind spots which make the United States less safe in a broader perspective.

A research article, “The Islamic State in the news: Journalistic differentiation of Islamist terrorism from Islam, terror news proximity, and Islamophobic attitudes” enlightens the false showcase of Islamic states in media and its incorrect depictions based on religion which resulted in activating negative stereotypes about Muslims and encourages Islamophobia. (Suleiman) The act of how journalists report the news of Islamist terrorism is the main concern that needs the utmost attention.

Over the decades a lot of research has been done on how media and journalism has been used to develop an image of a culture, race, religion, language etc. Corbin states that when you hear the word “terrorist,” who do you picture? Chances are it is not a white person. Von Sikorski et al in their research explains that since the self-proclamation of the Islamic State (IS) also known as the IS Caliphate, on June 29, 2014, the news media outlets around the world reported extensively on various IS activities. (Saifuddin & Matthes) It includes hundreds of planned, attempted, or realized terrorist attacks. In the process, questions regarding how news media should report acts of terrorism performed by Islamists (people who belong to Islam and believes that Islam should influence political systems) have become central.

Among the most pressing concerns, the extent to which media outlets differentiate and should differentiate Islamist terrorists from other Muslims (or Islamists) living in particular societies (e.g., certain Western societies) has received particular attention, because such acts are planned and committed in the name of Islam by terrorists who identify as Muslims. Observers have highlighted, that the failure to differentiate the groups can provoke or confirm negative stereotypes of all Muslims. This can consequently trigger unwanted and negative effects on news consumers’ perceptions of Muslim citizens. For instance, addressing the 2005 terrorist attack in London, Gerhards and Schäfer (2014) showed that the extent of such differentiation varied among news outlets that reported on the attack. Whereas the pan-Arab station Al Jazeera, headquartered in Qatar, explicitly differentiated Islamist terrorists from Muslims in general and “stressed that ‘Many Muslims have condemned the attacks’, the Cable News Network (CNN), based in Atlanta, GA, did not.

Similarly, the U.S. media’s coverage of the massacre at a mosque in Quebec City, where the shooter killed six people and injured another nineteen had early reports signifying that police were holding two men. Fox News released on twitter that there was a single Moroccan suspect: “Suspect in Quebec Mosque terrorist attack was of Moroccan origin”. But the actuality of the situation was that out of those two people held by police, one born in Canada and other born in Morocco which is a Muslim majority country, the gunman was the white French Canadian and the Moroccan-born man, Mohamed Belkhadir, was the one who had called the police when he heard shots. Far from being guilty, Belkhadir had been trying to help people when the police arrested him. (Schladebeck)

When we consider the policy, it is worth noting that the U.S. government’s retort to terrorism has excessively targeted Muslims. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) for example was passed after the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995(which Muslims had nothing to do with), “almost exclusively” against the community of Muslims.

The Oklahoma bombing was done by a white Christian is an exception as it was considered to be an act of terrorism (Jenkins), even though Islamic terrorist groups were accused for it at first. The terrorist was not a word applied to the white Christian accountable for neither the Quebec City attack, nor that person was the only one in escaping the classification as a terrorist. There is a list that consists of white Christians, often white supremacists whose beliefs drove them to attack 37 Jewish community centers, women’s health clinics, Sikh temples and 36 police officers. It also takes in the white Christian terrorist whose killing of nine African Americans in 2015 at Charleston, a South Carolina church is generally recognized as a hate crime and not certainly as terrorism. Loretta Lynch a former Attorney General stated that, “Hate crimes are the original domestic terrorism.” On the other hand, the terrorist label is typically kept for when violence is committed by a Muslim. If a Muslim accused for violent activities expresses appreciation for preceding mass shooters and writes “those who allow their God to be mocked have no God ” that person would directly be regarded as a terrorist. However, a white Christian guilty of violence had voiced appreciation for the Charleston attacker and wrote that very statement was not labeled as terrorist.

A Congressman vigorously announced that white violence is just different. When questioned about the attack at Quebec City, precisely, as to why the president is not “talking about the white terrorists who mowed down six Muslims praying at their mosque,” he replied: “I don’t know . . . . There’s a difference. You don’t have a group like ISIS or al Qaeda that is inspiring [attacks] around the world . . . . That was a one off.” (Corbin) It means that terrorism and violent acts are only limited to when they are done in the name of Islam or when any Muslim is involved in the act, regardless of the fact that the Muslim involved was a victim or not.

Most of the media sources are based on propaganda that targets a religion by outsourcing only the negative views about it. Another fact about it is that when the media publishes anything that involves the word Islam or Muslims it gains a lot of attention. One study, after monitoring for variables such as fatality rate, found that Muslim attacks are given 49 percent more media coverage on average. That’s why the view most of the common people have when they hear the word Muslim or Islam is negative. When in actuality none of this is neither a part of Islam nor majority of Muslims represent.

Different researches show the importance of what media feeds the society, shapes their ideas. The perspective about Muslims around the world being terrorists even before 9/11 and the media presentation of this terrorism associated with Muslims was encouraging this idea all along. The consequences of this false or rather inaccurate presentation resulted in Islamophobia, and the Muslims living in the West bear its harsh consequences. The hatred it unleashed towards Muslims that were totally unrelated to the terrorists was ugly. Here is a ted talk of Dalia Mogahed who is the director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) that explains her experience of “What it’s like to be a Muslim in America”. In this Ted talk she talked about her experience as a Muslim in States. The day after 9/11 happened, how she left her home and moved just because she practiced Islam and how wearing hijab and practicing her religion was difficult in that time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzkFoetp-_M  (Mogahed)

This is the power the media holds that blinds the factual views of a situation because the main source of information that people consume is basically this very media. Only and only if this biasness of media is resolved. And they release the information responsibly by keeping in mind that terrorists do not represent Muslims and that they are two different entities, it can help to lessen the horrific consequences it imposes on the lives of people. It can also help in making a society more secure and provide more freedom of perspective to the people of all color and religion on a fair basis.

Works Cited

Alfonseca, K. (2021, September 11). 20 years after 9/11, Islamophobia continues to haunt Muslims. ABC News. Retrieved March 25, 2023, from https://abcnews.go.com/US/20-years-911-islamophobia-continues-haunt-muslims/story?id=79732049

Corbin, C. (2017). Terrorists Are Always Muslim but Never White: At the Intersection of Critical Race Theory and Propaganda. Fordham Law Review, 86(2), 445-462.

Jenkins, J. (26 Aug. 2022). Oklahoma City bombing. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved March 25, 2023, from https://www.britannica.com/event/Oklahoma-City-bombing

Mogahed, D. (2016, March 15). What it’s like to be a Muslim in America | Dalia Mogahed. Retrieved March 25, 2023, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzkFoetp-_M

Saifuddin, A., & Matthes, J. (2017). Media representation of Muslims and Islam from 2000 to 2015: A meta-analysis. International communication gazette, 79(3), 219-244.

Schladebeck, J. (2017, February 02). Justin Trudeau Pressures Fox News into Deleting Incorrect Quebec Mosque Shooting Tweet. New York Daily News. Retrieved from https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/justin-trudeau-forces-fox-news-delete-incorrect-quebec-tweet-article-1.2962251

Scott, E. (2017, February 8). Congressman on terrorism acts by white people: ‘There’s a difference’. CNN. Retrieved March 25, 2023, from https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/07/politics/sean-duffy-white-terrorism-cnntv

Semmerling, T. J. (2006). “Evil” Arabs in American Popular Film: Orientalist Fear. University of Texas Press. Retrieved March 25, 2023

Suleiman, M. W. (1999). Islam, Muslims and Arabs in America: the other of the other of the other… Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 19(1), 33-47.

Tehranian, J. (2008). The Last Minstrel Show-Racial Profiling, the War on Terrorism and the Mass Media. Connecticut Law Review, 41(3), 781.

Von Sikorski, C., Matthes, J., & Schmuck, D. (2021). The Islamic State in the news: Journalistic differentiation of Islamist terrorism from Islam, terror news proximity, and Islamophobic attitudes. Communication Research, 48(2), 203–232.