Covering Muslims

American Newspapers in Comparative Perspective

Author: Erik Bleich and A. Maurits van der Veen

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Description

An examination of how American newspaper articles on Muslims are strikingly negative by any measure.For decades, scholars and observers have criticized negative media portrayals of Muslims and Islam. Yet most of these critiques are limited by their focus on one specific location, a limited time period, or a single outlet. In Covering Muslims, Erik Bleich and A. Maurits van der Veen present the first systematic,large-scale analysis of American newspaper coverage of Muslims through comparisons across groups, time, countries, and topics. The authors demonstrate conclusively that coverage of Muslims is remarkably negative by any measure. Theyshow that American newspapers have been consistently negative across the two-decade period between 1996 and 2016 and that articles on Muslims are more negative than those touching on groups as diverse as Catholics, Jews, Hindus, African Americans, Latinos, Mormons, or atheists. Strikingly, even articles about mundane topics tend to be negative. The authors suggest that media outlets both within and outside the United States may contribute to pervasive Islamophobia and they encourage readers andjournalists to "tone check" the media rather than simply accepting negative associations with Muslims or other marginalized groups.

Awards

Winner of Winner, 2024 ICOMM Book Award, International Studies Association.

Critic Reviews

Extensive and significantly representative...journalists, editors, publishers, and those who train them (journalism and communication schools, religion departments, professional guilds) should take note. Ken Chitwood, Reading Religion

About the Author

Erik Bleich is Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books, including The Freedom to Be Racist? How the United States and Europe Struggle to Preserve Freedom and Combat Racism (Oxford University Press, 2011). His scholarship has appeared in journals in the fields of political science, communications, sociology, religion, and law, and he has contributed topublic discussions in the Atlantic, Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. He directs the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project, which uses computer-assisted techniques to analyze media representations ofmarginalized groups.A. Maurits van der Veen is Associate Professor of Government at William & Mary. He is the author of Ideas, Interests and Foreign Aid (2011), which examines the framing of spending on foreign populations by European politicians. His work has appeared in journals in political science, communications, and religion, and has been discussed in media outlets such as The Washington Post. He directs the STAIR (Systematic Text Analysis for InternationalRelations) lab at William & Mary, which develops and applies computational social science techniques for the analysis of large corpora of political texts.

More on this Book

An examination of how American newspaper articles on Muslims are strikingly negative by any measure.For decades, scholars and observers have criticized negative media portrayals of Muslims and Islam. Yet most of these critiques are limited by their focus on one specific location, a limited time period, or a single outlet. In Covering Muslims, Erik Bleich and A. Maurits van der Veen present the first systematic, large-scale analysis of American newspaper coverage of Muslims through comparisons across groups, time, countries, and topics. The authors demonstrate conclusively thatcoverage of Muslims is remarkably negative by any measure. They show that American newspapers have been consistently negative across the two-decade period between 1996 and 2016 and that articles on Muslims are more negative than those touching on groups as diverse as Catholics, Jews, Hindus, African Americans,Latinos, Mormons, or atheists. Strikingly, even articles about mundane topics tend to be negative. The authors suggest that media outlets both within and outside the United States may contribute to pervasive Islamophobia and they encourage readers and journalists to "tone check" the media rather than simply accepting negative associations with Muslims or other marginalized groups.