Domination of media, negative image of Muslims in America

A report by Israeli daily Times of Israel has revealed that the American and Europeans' warm welcome of the displaced Ukrainians in 2022 has been quite different from the rough and mainly hostile policies towards the Syrian refugees in early years after 2010.

Experts have highlighted the role of religious identities in this process as studies have revealed that the Syrian refuges, mainly Muslim, were facing high levels of discrimination in comparison with Ukrainians who were mostly Christian.

According to a 2007 poll by Pew Research Center, the negative images of the public towards Muslims are mainly due to what they receive from the media.

Muniba Saleem, communication researcher and her colleagues have found the relations between media information and clichéd beliefs, negative feelings and support for negative policies towards Muslims in America.

A 2022 publication, "Covering Muslims: American Newspapers in Comparative Perspective" has detailed the issue in a bid to provide a better understanding of the image of Muslims created by the media.

Saleem said," We have found very negative media coverage of Muslims not only in the United States but also in Britain, Canada and Australia. Our previous studies have also found out feedbacks of the campaign by mass media against Muslims."

According to studies conducted from 2000 to 2015, communication researchers Saifuddin Ahmed and Jorg Matthes found that Muslims were represented quite negatively in Russian media and Islam is mainly introduced as a violent religion.

Their studies endeavor to answer two questions; first, if articles on Islam and Muslims have a more negative effect in comparison with other newspaper articles? Second, Do the articles on Islam leave a more negative image of Islam than those on other religions?

More than 256,963 articles on Muslims and Islam have been downloaded in order to answer these questions.

A number of articles from American dailies have been collected which were not only on Muslims but also on Catholics, Jews and Hindus, three minority religious groups with different populations and status in the American society and then the stories related to Muslims were compiled from a vast range of dailies in Britain, Canada and Australia.

The key achievement in this study was that an article which names Islam or Muslims in the US is 84 percent more negative than other articles.

This means that six articles in the US dailies must be read in order to leave the same negative impact that one article on Muslims does on the readers.