Covering Muslims by Erik Bleich;A. Maurits van der Veen;

Author:Erik Bleich;A. Maurits van der Veen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Different countries, similar stories

Media coverage of Muslims is plentiful not just in the United States but also across the three other predominantly Anglophone countries we examine.1 To understand its extent and nature, we assemble corpora of articles from prominent newspapers published in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia over the same 21-year period from January 1, 1996 through December 31, 2016. We mirror as closely as possible the broad sample of newspaper coverage that we obtained in the United States. Our sources thus range from left to right in political orientation, encompass different domestic geographic regions, and include broadsheets as well as tabloids. We ensure inclusion of high-circulation national newspapers that frequently influence regional and local newspapers and elite opinion in each country. Using newspaper database searches, we select all articles containing the root words Muslim*/Moslem* or Islam* in the title or in the article text for each newspaper across the entire period. Including all four countries, our international Muslim corpus contains 785,407 articles: the 256,963 that make up our American corpus; 318,437 from fifteen daily and nine Sunday British newspapers; 121,588 drawn from six Canadian newspapers; and 88,419 from six daily and four Sunday Australian newspapers.2

Figure 5.1 displays patterns in the daily article count across the four corpora, illustrating the striking change in coverage in all four countries associated with the 9/11 attacks in the United States. As in chapter 4, we use an exponential moving average (EMA) to smooth out the shorter-lived fluctuations and to ease interpretation.3 Since our corpora are different sizes and include different numbers of newspapers, a direct comparison of article counts makes little sense. Instead, we scale each country’s line to show variation around its overall average for the entire period. In other words, the value of 1 on the vertical axis corresponds to the country’s average daily article count in our corpus. The figure shows that the four countries’ publication patterns follow one another closely. Indeed, the correlation coefficients between these smoothed averages range from .75 (Britain and Canada) to .90 (Australia and US). In addition to the obvious rise associated with 9/11, there are also notable increases associated with the 2005 London transportation bombings as well as the period between 2014 and 2016, due to increased activity by ISIS and the sharp uptick of refugees to Europe.4

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