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1 Introduction
Introduction
On 18 October 2006 the British tabloid newspaper the Daily Star carried the
front page headline ‘BBC PUT MUSLIMS BEFORE YOU!’. The headline
was accompanied by a picture of a woman in a face-covering niqab making a
two-fingered gesture. Despite the fact that the 2001 census recorded
1,588,890 Muslims living in the United Kingdom, comprising 2.78 per cent
of the population,
1
the use of the word you to address the reader directly
appears to discursively exclude the possibility that a Muslim could buy the
newspaper or even read the headline.
It is unlikely, though, that Daily Star editors would think that Muslims
would never see the headline. Instead, the article seems to have been intended
to create an ‘us’ and ‘them’ distinction. On one side is the presumably non-
Muslim majority readership of the newspaper, represented as overlooked by
the BBC (a British public service broadcaster that is funded principally by an
annual licence fee). On the other are Muslims, implied to be the recipients of
undeserving privilege. One interpretation of the accompanying picture is that
the Muslim woman is making an insulting gesture towards all non-Muslims,
particularly Daily Star readers.
This article is an explicit case of British journalism fanning the flames of
conflict between the mostly white, nominally Christian (though mainly non-
churchgoing) majority of people living in the United Kingdom and the
minority of Muslim residents, many whom were born in the United Kingdom,
although their parents or grandparents may have come from countries such as
Pakistan, India or Bangladesh. While Ford (2008) reports that most British
people have become more accepting of ethnic minority groups, McLaren and
Johnson (2007) and Eatwell and Goodwin (2010) have noted that public
concerns about topics such as immigration, law and order and Islam have
become more salient since 1999. In general, attitudes towards Muslims in the
United Kingdom have not been positive. For example, according to the
1
From the Office for National Statistics; www.ons.gov.uk/ons/index.html.
1
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British Social Attitudes survey in 2003, 62 per cent of Britons believed that
British Muslims were more loyal to Muslims abroad than to British non-
Muslims (McLaren and Johnson 2007). Another survey, carried out by the
Exploring Islam Foundation in 2010, found that 40 per cent of British adults
(in a sample of 2,152) felt that Muslims had not had a positive impact on
British society. Half the respondents linked Islam with terrorism, while only
13 per cent and 6 per cent believed that Islam was based on peace and
justice, respectively. Sixty per cent said they did not know much about the
religion, although, perhaps more encouragingly, a third said they would like
to know more.
2
At the time of writing, there is a sense that opposition to Muslims has
grown in recent years in the United Kingdom. A group called the English
Defence League was formed in 2009, and since then it has conducted anti-
Islam demonstrations in cities and towns including Birmingham, Bradford,
Leeds, Leicester, London, Newcastle, Oldham and Preston. Many of these
places have relatively high numbers of Muslims, and some of these demon-
strations have resulted in conflict, street violence and arrests. This growing
opposition is hardly confined to the United Kingdom but seems to be part of
a larger trend: attitudes towards Islam in other parts of Europe, and the
United States, appear to be hardening. In 2010 a proposal to build a Muslim
community centre two blocks north of the site where al-Qaeda terrorists flew
two hijacked planes into the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001
resulted in protests about a ‘Ground Zero mosque’. In France, the Senate
approved the banning of the face-covering burqa in all public places, while
other European countries including Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria,
Denmark, the United Kingdom and Switzerland have seen discussions about
similar bans. The Swiss government banned the building of new minarets
(towers that are distinctive features of mosques) in 2009. Such events
suggest that a sense of animosity between ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim
world’ has intensified since 11 September 2001.
This book focuses on the role that the British national press has played in
representing Muslims and Islam, particularly in the years following the 9/11
attacks. We have chosen to focus on the printed media because we believe
that it plays an important role in shaping opinions as well as setting agendas
regarding the importance of certain topics. As an indication of the ‘news
value’ of Muslims, between 2000 and 2009 the word Muslim and its plural
appeared 121,125 times in the national British press (about thirty-three times
a day on average), suggesting that this is a topic that the UK press feels is
worthy of considerable focus.
2
See www.inspiredbymuhammad.com/campaign.php.
2 Introduction
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The media present information about world events to masses of individuals.
As it is never possible to present a completely impartial, accurate and full
account of an event, instead the media offer representations of events,
through the use of language (spoken or written) and/or images (still or
moving). Such representations are often restrained by space and time limita-
tions; journalists need to prioritise particular events, as well as certain
people’s perspectives or opinions, over others. Additionally, summaries of
events may be coloured by the political priorities of newspapers or the
abilities of the journalists who are writing for them. In the United Kingdom,
national newspapers function as more than mere ‘mirrors’ of reality. Instead,
they have the role of constructing ideologically motivated versions of reality,
which are aimed at persuading people that certain phenomena are good or
bad, leading John Richardson (2004: 227) to describe journalism as an
‘argumentative discourse genre’. Thus, British national newspapers attempt
to exert (often successfully) social and political influence, though, as dis-
cussed below, newspapers must also balance this aim with reflecting the
views of audiences. As Gerbner et al.(1986) have shown, the media have a
long-term effect on audiences, small at first, but compounding over time as a
result of the repetition of images and concepts. Although our main goal is to
examine how language is used to represent Muslims and Islam, more specific
aims involve focusing on whether there have been changes in representation
over time, and whether there are differences between newspapers. We are also
interested in identifying the various techniques or strategies that newspapers
employ in order to legitimate or justify certain representations, particularly
those that may be controversial or would otherwise result in people complain-
ing about the newspaper.
In this chapter, we first describe the context of our own study: the British
national press. We then locate our study among others that have examined
the representation of Islam and Muslims in various media around the world.
Following that, we outline two types of linguistic analysis, which we
combined in order to conduct our research: critical discourse analysis, a
process that combines close analysis of language with consideration of
social context; and corpus linguistics, which uses computational tools to
uncover linguistic patterns across very large amounts of text. After describ-
ing how we collected the articles to be analysed in this book, we consider
the limitations of our approach, and then give an overview of the remainder
of the book.
Before we can examine the ways that the British press have written about
Muslims and Islam, it is useful to look at the British press in general. The
following section gives a brief account of different ways of classifying British
newspapers, as well as examining issues surrounding readership, influence,
political bias and complaints processes.
Introduction 3
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The British press
The British press is composed of a wide range of different types of news-
papers, distinguished by frequency of appearance (daily, Sunday, weekly),
political stance (left-leaning, right-leaning, centrist or ‘independent’), style
(broadsheet, tabloid or ‘middle-market’) and coverage (national, regional).
In deciding which newspapers to focus on, we were initially constrained by
availability. We used an online searchable archive (Nexis UK), which gave
us access to the text (but not the images) of a wide range of newspapers.
While it would have been interesting to examine regional newspapers, and to
compare whether areas with higher populations of Muslims had different
news coverage from others, we eventually decided to focus on news repor-
tage at the national level, reasoning that such newspapers would be more
readily available to the entire population of the United Kingdom, and thus
potentially more influential. It is certainly the case that regional newspapers
have a role to play in the way that the country views Islam; for example, a
2006 article on Muslim women and the veil in the Lancashire Evening
Telegraph written by the then leader of the House of Commons, Jack
Straw, triggered a national debate on veiling (see Chapter 8). It is the fact
that this story was picked up by the national press that is of key interest to us.
We have included both daily and Sunday editions of newspapers. The
Sunday editions tend to be longer (sometimes as a result of supplemental
magazines or sections), and often have different editors from the daily
editions. Traditionally, the Sunday editions of British newspapers have been
responsible for breaking or covering sexual or political scandals.
3
For the
purposes of our analysis, we have classed The Observer as the Sunday
version of The Guardian, and the now defunct News of the World as the
Sunday version of The Sun.
4
One Sunday newspaper, The People,hasno
daily equivalent. Our data set also contains a weekly newspaper called The
Business, which converted to a magazine format in the autumn of 2006 and
then closed in 2008. These two latter publications contributed only a small
proportion of our data.
Readers of this book who are unfamiliar with the national British press
may benefit from further information. The national British press works
within a system of capitalist democracy, meaning that people choose to
buy print newspapers from a range of possible options (often from local
3
Examples include David Beckham’s affair with Rebecca Loos (broken by the News of the
World in 2004), Max Mosley’s private sadomasochistic sexual acts with prostitutes (News of
the World, 2008) and MPs’ expense claims (Sunday Telegraph, 2009).
4
As the News of the World did not contain much text, we have tended simply to conflate it with
The Sun. However, The Observer tends to be a longer newspaper, so we have often viewed it
separately from The Guardian.
4 Introduction
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shops, newsagents, supermarkets, petrol stations or kiosks at railway or
bus stations).
5
By the beginning of the twenty-first century national news-
papers also published online versions, which were mainly free to access at
the time that the corpus was collected (although some newspapers have
since begun to charge for access). Such online access, combined with
the high status of the English language and the fact that the United
Kingdom is a relatively rich and culturally influential country, means that
the British press has a potential reach beyond its own shores. British
newspapers compete for readers and do not receive government funding.
As Sparks (1999: 45–6) points out, newspapers ‘do not exist to report the
news… They exist to make money.’
To survive, a newspaper needs to be attractive to readers, enough of whom
will maintain some form of ‘brand loyalty’ to that newspaper. The period under
examination (1998 to 2009) saw talk of a crisis in print journalism, with sales
figures suggesting that newspapers were in decline
6
and losing readers to other
sources such as twenty-four-hour television news or online news, although
Conboy (2010: 145) argues that newspapers are adapting to the paradigm shift
by incorporating their products to online formats, as noted above.
Some academic research indicates that newspapers have considerable
power to influence public opinion (see van Dijk 1991). For example, Lido
(2006) has demonstrated that the negative portrayal of asylum seekers in the
press had a direct and immediate effect on readers’ assumptions about
asylum seekers. Brescoll and LaFrance (2004) examined news stories about
sex differences, and found that readers tend to accept explanations about sex
differences as being scientifically valid, rather than being linked to the
newspaper’s political standpoint, while Dietrich et al.(2006) found that
subjects who read a newspaper article that linked mentally ill people to
violent crime subsequently had an increased likelihood of describing a
mentally ill person as dangerous and violent. The power of influence pos-
sessed by the press therefore seems well established.
One significant way that newspapers can impact on society is by their
perceived ability to influence the outcome of national elections. Linton (1995)
and McKee (1995) have both attributed the defeat of the Labour Party in
the UK general election of 1992 to The Sun’s pre-election anti-Labour
campaign that year. Sanders, Marsh and Ward (1993) and Gavin and
Sanders (2002), who concentrated on news reporting of the economy, found
5
Some local newspapers are free, relying heavily on advertising, and are either delivered to
homes or can be picked up from kiosks or collection points in towns or cities.
6
For example, sales of all daily newspapers between 2007 and 2008 dropped – by as much as
10.3 per cent for The Independent or as little as 1.43 per cent for The Sun (www.guardian.co.uk/
media/table/2009/jan/09/abc-december-national-newspapers).
The British press 5
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that there was an indirect influence exerted by press coverage on voting
perceptions. However, research does not always indicate that newspapers
can affect elections. For example, Norris et al.(1999) looked at a shift in
some British newspaper coverage from the concept of ‘sleaze’ to ‘Europe’
during 1997, and conclude that this shift did not impact on the outcome of
the 1997 general election.
In line with other writers on news media, including Martin Conboy, Norman
Fairclough and Ron Scollon, we view the relationship between newspapers and
readers or audiences as complex, with each influencing the other. Conboy (2010:
7) writes that ‘[n]ewspapers have always created readers, not news, as their
primary function’, and argues that viewing the role of newspapers as mirroring
society is ‘lazy-minded’ (Conboy 2010: 4). However, he also points out: ‘News-
papers over time have adapted to articulate particular variants of language for
particular social groups’ (Conboy 2010: 6). Newspapers thus help to bring the
concept of particular social groups into being – Anderson’s (1983) concept of
‘imagined communities’ being relevant to note here. However, readers are not
passively constructed; meaning is created frominteraction between a text and its
readers (McIlvenny 1996), and a newspaper’s fortunes may suffer if it falls too
far out of step with the social group buying it. For example, Gibson (2003)
argues that the Daily Mirror’s anti-war stance on Iraq in 2003 was a factor in its
circulation dropping to below 2 million for the first time in seventy years.
Additionally, individual members of audiences possess multiple identities
(based on gender, nationality, region, social class, age, sexuality, ethnicity,
religion, political views, etc.), and particular identities may become extremely
salient if newspapers do not take this into account. The Sun’s negative and
inaccurate coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster (in
which ninety-six people died) resulted in many people in Liverpool boycotting
the paper – a boycott that has lasted to the time of writing.
7
Newspapers thus
construct society and the identities of their readers, but if they wish to be
successful they must also construct themselves in relationship to their readers.
One way of classifying newspapers relates to style and format. A distinction
can be made between tabloids and broadsheets. Tabloids are generally smaller
in size, have short articles, use puns in headlines, tend to focus more on
national stories, particularly about celebrities, sport and entertainment, and
employ a more populist and informal writing style. Broadsheets are normally
larger, contain more text, have more focus on international news and political
analysis, and generally use a more formal writing style. Tabloids tend to be
7
The Sun made the unsubstantiated claim that Liverpool fans urinated on the bodies of the dead
and attacked rescue workers. In September 2012, after the publication of an official report
concluding that no Liverpool fans were responsible for the disaster, the then editor, Kelvin
MacKenzie, apologised for the article.
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more popular with working-class readers whereas broadsheets are more com-
monly bought by the middle classes, which, in Britain, refers to professionals
(see Figure 3.2). For the period under examination, the tabloid/broadsheet
distinction becomes problematic for a number of reasons. First, some news-
papers are easier to classify than others. A newspaper such as The Sun could
be thought of as being a typical tabloid, having its title in a red nameplate
(tabloids are sometimes called ‘red tops’) and printing many stories about
celebrities and sport. The Daily Mail, on the other hand, is of a similar size
to The Sun, but contains longer articles and has a more formal writing style
than The Sun, as well as having its title in black ink. However, while the Daily
Mail seems to feature more political articles, it often appears to articulate a
‘tabloid’ world view, associated with populist politics or even a politics of fear,
suggestive of attempts to create moral panic (see, for example, an analysis of its
construction of gay people as promiscuous and proselytisers by Baker 2005).
Some people refer to the Daily Mail and the Daily Express as ‘middle-market’
newspapers rather than tabloids.
To make matters more complicated, there are aspects of broadsheets that
make them appear closer to tabloids. For example, the broadsheet newspaper
The Guardian has a daily supplement, referred to as a ‘tabloid section’, that
focuses on more populist reporting of celebrity gossip and quirky and
‘human interest’ stories. Additionally, most broadsheet newspapers have
become smaller in size over time. The Times and The Independent are now
the same size as tabloids (and are sometimes referred to as ‘compacts’),
whereas The Guardian has reduced its size to what is called a ‘Berliner’
format. Thomas (2005: 154–5) argues that the popularity of tabloids has
impacted on all forms of news reporting, with a move in the elite press
towards populism. Distinctions between newspapers are thus made with
regard to multiple factors and are gradient in nature rather than binary. As
well as noting that the distinction between tabloid and broadsheet is impres-
sionistic and personal, we also need to take into account the fact that
newspapers can change style over time, or even within a particular issue.
Another way of conceiving of the differences in focus and style between
newspapers is to use the terms popular and quality.AsTables 1.2 and 1.3
show, The Sun,Daily Mail and Daily Mirror are the three most popular
newspapers, whereas the traditional broadsheets The Guardian and The Inde-
pendent are the least popular. However, the right-leaning broadsheets, or
‘qualities’, The Times and The Daily Telegraph are actually more popular
than the Daily Express and the Daily Star.Popular therefore more accurately
refers to ‘populist’ than number of copies sold or read. The term quality,on
the other hand, refers to newspapers that take a more serious approach to news
reporting, with a higher proportion of political or international stories and
more in-depth analysis. Pricing tends to correlate with sales to an extent: in
The British press 7
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September 2006 the highest-selling newspaper, The Sun, cost 35p whereas the
two lowest-selling papers, The Guardian and The Independent, cost twice as
much).
8
In this book we maintain the tabloid/broadsheet distinction, as it is
the one that most British people are familiar with, although we acknowledge
that the terms are broad and do not always apply.
A second important distinction is to do with political affiliation. Post-
structuralists would maintain that it is impossible to write from an unbiased
stance (arguing that the aim to be unbiased is in itself a ‘position’). Even a
news source such as the BBC News website, which claims no political
affiliation, could be said to contain biases within its reporting (from the choice
of stories that it prioritises to the opinions it decides to quote or foreground in
a particular article). Nonetheless, even armed with the knowledge that bias is
unavoidable, visitors to the United Kingdom are sometimes surprised at how
partial British newspapers appear to be. Newspapers declare allegiance to
particular political parties and urge their readers to vote accordingly. For
example, the 1992 election win for the Conservative Party was reported by
The Sun on 11 April as ‘It was the Sun wot won it!’. Despite their political
standpoints, newspapers are not normally blindly loyal to a particular party
(and even less so to leaders of parties). Many newspapers backed Tony Blair’s
‘New’ Labour Party in 1997, including the right-leaning Sun and the
left-leaning Guardian. However, in later years many newspapers became
negatively disposed towards Labour, and in the 2010 election The Guardian
backed the Liberal Democrats while The Sun favoured the Conservatives. The
political terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are relative, multifaceted and therefore
problematic, and we use them to indicate a broad overall stance, while
acknowledging that within a newspaper there may be some columnists who
have been chosen precisely because they represent an antagonistic view (the
Conservative Member of Parliament Anne Widdecombe was briefly
employed as an ‘agony aunt’ by The Guardian, for instance), and that there
are different ways of being ‘left’ or ‘right’. For example, someone could hold
leftist economic views, and advocate that all property should be government-
owned, that there should be wage equality and that the state should provide
benefits for those who are less able. Yet the same person could hold rightist
social views, in arguing that homosexuality and abortion are wrong, that the
death sentence is an acceptable form of punishment and that immigration
should be highly regulated. Consequently, we use the terms right-leaning and
left-leaning, rather than left-wing and right-wing, in this book, as the latter
two terms suggest that a newspaper occupies an extreme position. When
8
The correlation is not perfect, though. The broadsheet newspaper The Daily Telegraph cost as
much (70p) as The Guardian and The Independent in September 2006, but sold more news-
papers than the less expensive tabloids the Daily Express (40p) and the Daily Star (35p).
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compared with newspapers across the world or throughout other periods in
history, the British press does not currently occupy the most extreme political
positions possible; the newspapers are not at the ‘wing’. Table 1.1 shows our
(admittedly impressionistic) view of where the newspapers we included in our
corpus fall in terms of their style and political position.
Readers will have noticed that the majority of the tabloids are right-leaning,
whereas the broadsheets appear to be more evenly spread. At a first glance,
this would appear to suggest that the corpus of newspaper articles we have
collected will be somewhat skewed to the right. However, it should be borne
in mind that the tabloids generally contain less written text than the broad-
sheets; it should also be noted that, for some of the right-leaning newspapers
(The Business, the Daily Express,The Star,The Sun and The Daily Tele-
graph), the archiving of data in Nexis UK was rather patchy for the years
1998 and 1999.
Along with political affiliation, it is worth taking into account where the
newspapers generally stand on religion. Taira, Poole and Knott (forthcom-
ing) carried out a profiling of newspapers based on the analysis of stories
about Geert Wilders, a Dutch conservative politician who was banned from
entering the United Kingdom in 2009 because of concerns over his anti-
Islam views, and a visit by the Pope to the country in 2010. They placed
British newspapers on a pro-/anti-religious continuum. At one end of the
continuum were two pro-Christian newspapers, The Daily Telegraph and the
Daily Express. Next to them were the Daily Mail and The Sun. At the
opposite end of the continuum were more secularist newspapers, which were
sometimes openly critical of religion. These included The Independent and
The Guardian. In the middle of the continuum were the Daily Star, the Daily
Mirror and The Times. It can be seen that, generally, the pro-Christian
newspapers were also right-leaning, whereas the two secularist newspapers
were left-leaning.
Table 1.1 The British national press
Left-leaning Right-leaning
Tabloid Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror The Sun and News of the World
Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday
Daily Express and Sunday Express
Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday
The People
Broadsheet The Guardian and The Observer
The Independent and Independent
on Sunday
The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday
Telegraph
The Times and The Sunday Times
The Business
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Another factor when considering newspapers also needs to be taken into
account: newspapers contain more than ‘hard news’, or stories about import-
ant current political and social events. They also feature a great deal of ‘soft
news’, consisting of celebrity gossip, ‘human interest’ stories (which often
have little impact on anyone except for those directly related to the story)
and reviews and commentaries about books, films, music, plays, gadgets,
computer games, fashions, restaurants and holiday destinations. Such art-
icles are also found in magazines and thus could be viewed as belonging to
genres of entertainment, or even advertising, rather than news. Additionally,
newspapers employ columnists or commentators, to write on particular
topics (often on a weekly basis). Such columnists may or may not be
representative of the newspaper’s general stance, and one columnist may
work for multiple newspapers. Some columnists were well known to the
public for other reasons before they started writing columns (such as the
British television presenters Jeremy Clarkson and Robert Kilroy-Silk), while
others became well known through their journalism (such as Julie Burchill
and Richard Littlejohn).
Columnists are generally granted more freedom than journalists, who
engage in the ‘hard’ reporting of facts. Their columns normally aim to be
entertaining, provocative or populist, and as a result are more openly opi-
nionated than other forms of journalism. During the period we focused on, the
British press was regulated by the Press Complaints Commission (PCC),
which describes itself on its website
9
as ‘an independent self-regulatory body
which deals with complaints about the editorial content of newspapers and
magazines (and their websites)’. The PCC contains an editors’ code of
practice, which was originally written in 1991 and had almost thirty changes
made to it by 2011. The PCC’s website describes the code as not constituting
a legal document but, instead, setting a benchmark for ethical standards and
acting as ‘the cornerstone of the system of self-regulation to which the
industry has made a binding commitment’. The code (about 1,400 words in
length) is divided into sixteen main sections, which cover areas such as
accuracy, discrimination and privacy. The discrimination section, for
example, reads:
(i) The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s
race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or to any physical or
mental illness or disability.
(ii) Details of an individual’s race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, physical
or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to
the story.
9
See www.pcc.org.uk/index.html.
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