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Media portrayal of terrorism and Muslims: a content analysis of Turkey and France

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Connor Nickerson
Connor Nickerson
Connor Nickerson
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Abstract and Figures

The media plays a crucial role in highlighting the important facts the public should know by selecting, broadcasting, and emphasizing what events the public should classify and comprehend as important and what the public should assess as a threat (Slone Journal of Conflict Resolution 44(4): 508-522, 2000, Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira The International Journal of Press/Politics 13(1): 52-74, 2008). This paper explores the notion that the media reinforces a false synonym between Muslims and terrorism. I begin with a description of news framing bias and how this bias impacts the portrayal of terrorism and Muslims through politically and emotionally charged discourse. Then, through a content analysis of local and national news articles, I examine selected terrorist events in France and Turkey, analyzing the U.S media’s portrayal of these events to uncover what elements journalists select, emphasize, and deemphasize in countries with predominantly Muslim and non-Muslim populations. This analysis is useful in uncovering the mechanisms allowing U.S perception of perceived threat to rise in tandem with U.S national security’s placement on the current policy agenda, while the actual risks posed by terrorism and Muslim populations are marginal in comparison and continue to decline (Powell Communication Studies 62(1): 90-112, 2011). The findings suggest that news media framing utilizes biased, negative imagery, portraying the events in these countries in a way that reinforces current prejudices against Muslims, even when Muslims are themselves the victims. This unequal reporting increases viewership while simultaneously allowing current perceptions about terrorism and Muslims to continue.
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Media portrayal of terrorism and Muslims: a content
analysis of Turkey and France
Connor Nickerson
1
#Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract
The media plays a crucial role in highlighting the important facts the public should
know by selecting, broadcasting, and emphasizing what events the public should
classify and comprehend as important and what the public should assess as a threat
(Slone Journal of Conflict Resolution 44(4): 508-522, 2000, Papacharissi and de
Fatima Oliveira The International Journal of Press/Politics 13(1): 52-74, 2008). This
paper explores the notion that the media reinforces a false synonym between Muslims
and terrorism. I begin with a description of news framing bias and how this bias
impacts the portrayal of terrorism and Muslims through politically and emotionally
charged discourse. Then, through a content analysis of local and national news articles,
I examine selected terrorist events in France and Turkey, analyzing the U.S media’s
portrayal of these events to uncover what elements journalists select, emphasize, and
deemphasize in countries with predominantly Muslim and non-Muslim populations.
This analysis is useful in uncovering the mechanisms allowing U.S perception of
perceived threat to rise in tandem with U.S national security’s placement on the current
policy agenda, while the actual risks posed by terrorism and Muslim populations are
marginal in comparison and continue to decline (Powell Communication Studies 62(1):
90-112, 2011). The findings suggest that news media framing utilizes biased, negative
imagery, portraying the events in these countries in a way that reinforces current
prejudices against Muslims, even when Muslims are themselves the victims. This
unequal reporting increases viewership while simultaneously allowing current percep-
tions about terrorism and Muslims to continue.
Introduction
The events of September 11th, responsible for the deaths of nearly 3000 individuals,
brought the threat of terrorism to U.S soil. This event allowed new boundaries to be
formed, allegiances to be solidified, people to be excluded, and Bus^and Bthem^to be
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-019-09837-6
*Connor Nickerson
1
Boston, USA
Crime, Law and Social Change (2019) 72:547–567
May
Published online: 6 2019
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... Too frequently, the media links terrorism to Islam, which fuels harmful stereotypes and contributes to the stigmatization of Muslim communities. Research shows that biased media narratives can exacerbate Islamophobia, deepen societal divides, and influence policies that marginalize Muslim populations (Nickerson, 2019;Li & Zhang, 2022). ...
... Sikorsi et al. (2021) also examined media representation of terrorism, noting a prevalence of undifferentiated coverage linking Muslims to terrorism, particularly in proximity to terrorist events. Nickerson (2019) highlighted that media often falsely equate Muslims with terrorism, perpetuating negative stereotypes through biased reporting. Similarly, studies by Luqiu and Yangg (2019) and Raza (2019) found that Chinese state media portrays Muslims as the root cause of Islamophobia in China. ...
... The representation of Muslims as terrorists in media correlates with increased public support for policies harmful to Muslims both domestically and internationally, mediated by perceptions of Muslims as aggressive (Saleem et al., 2017). This biased coverage not only affects how Muslims perceive themselves and their representation in the media, but also perpetuates a cycle of prejudice and misunderstanding globally (Nickerson, 2019). Additionally, Muslim students in Britain report negative representations of Muslim countries, which impacts their self-esteem and cultural identity, compelling them to counteract these stereotypes by promoting a more accurate depiction of Islam (Brown, Brown, and Richards, 2015). ...
Opening Mosques For Non-Muslims: Muslim Religious Scholars Counter Negative Media Representation Of Terrorism In Kenya
Article
Full-text available
  • Dec 2024
This study investigated measures taken by Muslim religious scholars to counter media representation of terrorism in Kenya. As country with diverse religious groups and unique terrorism experience, Kenya presents a unique context for the study. Muslim scholars in Kenya, therefore, play a critical role within Muslim communities as they look after their congregation. The phe-nomenological theory was used as a framework for the study. The study used qualitative approach and phenomenology method. The study involved 10 participants drawn from the community of Muslim religious scholars operating in mosques and religious centers in Nairobi. The scholars were purposively sampled. The data was generated through in-depth interviews, analyzed thematically and presented in narrative form. The study found that Muslim religious scholars had taken measures like opening the mosques for the public and reaching out to non-Muslim religious leaders as a measure to counter what they perceived as a negative media representation of terrorism as a result of directly linking Islam with terrorism. The study concluded that there is need for guidelines and policies on terrorism coverage that recognize the place and the sensitivities of the Muslim population in Kenya, to improve media representation of terrorism, and as well as differentiate between Islam and terrorism, as part of the guidelines, and training journalists on their implementation.
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... (1) The key arguments in the broader field of religion, media, and culture, including their digital forms (Helland, 2005;Hjarvard, 2008;Kołodziejska, 2018); (2) The prevalent approaches to religion and the news media (Mitchell, 2012;Perreault, 2019;Stout & Buddenbaum, 2008); (3) The influence and weight of news values on general news (Harcup & O'Neill, 2001 and religion news (Dahinden et al., 2011;Mitchell, 2012); (4) The importance of different sociological factors in making general and religion news: economic structures (McNair, 2009;Mitchell, 2007); political structures, including press-party parallelism (Baker et al., 2013;Haede, 2013;Hallin & Mancini, 2004), geopolitical ideologies such as orientalism (Lewis et al., 2009;Nickerson, 2019;Said, 1997Said, , 2003 and occidentalism (Haede, 2013;Hungerford, 2006), political cultures or news as culture that also recognize religion's significant imprint on dominant cultures (Cunha, 2018(Cunha, , 2021Evolvi, 2018;Hallin & Mancini, 2004;Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2013); news audiences (Buddenbaum, 1998;Cottle, 2008Cottle, , 2010Hoover, 1998;Mitchell, 2007Mitchell, , 2012Schudson, 2003); and the professional-organizational routines, including newsroom practices and demographics (Cohen, 2018;McNair, 2009;Mitchell, 2007Mitchell, , 2012Mitchell, , 2015Schudson, 1989); (5) the literature on religion and the news (see this section and the Discussion section below for a range of relevant research). ...
... Although no specific common or unified approach to religion and the news is discussed, scholars encourage more sophisticated examination (Stout & Buddenbaum, 2008) and the search for a shared approach that can be used in different media systems (Khroul, 2014). The gap in the field of religion and the news this research identified is that different types of studies, including issue-specific studies, one-religion studies or general religion studies, find common problematic issues such as the overemployment of orientalist and occidentalist frameworks (Haede, 2013;Hungerford, 2006;Lewis et al., 2009;Lövheim, 2021;Nickerson, 2019;Said, 1997Said, , 2003, different degrees of hostility to religion (Gill, 2012;Haede, 2013;Richardson, 2011), stereotyping, reductionism, and absences in the news about religion (Baker et al., 2013;Bantimaroudis, 2007;Chen, 2003;Kerr & Moy, 2002;Mitchell, 2012;Pepinster, 2012). Furthermore, all these similar issues or democratic bits are typically revealed and tackled in the broader context of democracy, democratic society and news media, but are dispersed across different related studies (Baker et al., 2013;Bantimaroudis, 2007;Buddenbaum, 1998;Campbell, 2021;Hoover, 1998;Hutchings, 2021;Kodrich, 2005;Lövheim, 2021;Richardson, 2004). ...
A democratic approach to religion news: Newspaper coverage of Christianity and Islam in the UK and Turkey [Open Access, The Communication Review, Routledge]
Article
Full-text available
  • Nov 2024
  • Comm Rev
This paper introduces and utilizes a systematic and unified four-dimension democratic approach to the study of newspaper religion reporting to examine the coverage of faith, particularly Christianity and Islam, in the British and Turkish national press. While the research employs a sample from 2014 and uses framing analysis through content analysis of 1,022 news articles supplemented by qualitative examples, this democratic approach crosses time and country boundaries. The findings reveal that, in both countries, alongside the contrasting portrayals of the minority religions, even the dominant religions had disproportioned employment of the four dimensions: spiritual, world life, political, and conflict. The spiritual dimension had limited use in both countries, particularly in the UK. There was significantly less employment of context for putting faith in action in the reporting of Christians in the world life dimension in the UK compared to the coverage of Muslims in Turkey. The results suggest a potential, though untested, application of this approach as a democracy index against which the press can improve its faith coverage. This study’s theoretical and methodological contribution to scholarship outweighs its empirical findings in the fields of religion in the news, comparative journalism studies, and empirical research on news media’s democratic performance.
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... Numerous qualitative studies have employed critical discourse analyses (Benhaddou, 2021;Tahir, 2013;Poorebrahim & Zarei, 2013), and others employed quantitative content analysis and surveys (Poorebrahim et al., 2013;Bleich, et al, 2015). In addition, research on Muslim media portrayals was also conducted in over 39 countries (Ahmed & Matthes, 2017), such as Australia, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, Turkey, and France, among others (Aly, 2007;Spielhaus, 2010;Arlt, 2021;Nickerson, 2019). All these studies find a consistent pattern of depicting Muslims in a negative light. ...
Navigating Stigma Framing: Media Securitization and Crisis Communication Strategies for Islamic Organizations
Thesis
Full-text available
  • Jul 2024
With the rise of the global Muslim population, Islamic organizations like Muslim student associations, Islamic community centers, and Islamic non-profits across the world play a significant role in representing this diverse and growing population of Muslims. However, risks of potential media attacks and defamation against these Islamic organizations pose a continuous and substantial challenge to their integration and acceptance in their communities. Using two studies, this paper investigates media stigmatization of Islamic organizations, the effects of such stigmatization on audience perceptions, and methods to mitigate its effects. Study 1 employs a quantitative content analysis of Western news outlets to analyze the stigmatization used to securitize an Islamic organization, the Muslim Brotherhood (N=453). The study reveals that conservative sources are more likely to stigmatize the Muslim Brotherhood. We also find shifts in types of stigmatizations across three key events, which suggest that Western media gradually paved the way for the securitization of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Our second study, a 3x3 survey experiment (N=953), finds that stigma framing using "radical", or "terrorist-linked" frames indeed leads to more negative feelings towards Islamic organizations. We find that political ideology does not moderate that relationship. We also find that both "attack" and "denial" crisis communication strategies are effective in mitigating stigma effects, with the latter having the strongest effect. Our research finds that media can play a role in securitizing Islamic organizations. It also reveals that negative effects of media stigmatization of Islamic organizations exist, and that Islamic organizations can utilize crisis communication strategies to mitigate these stigma effects.
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... In these cases, the choice of national identity becomes not just a personal matter but a social and political statement, often essential for accessing opportunities while negotiating an identity that bridges the expectations of home, school, and a frequently unwelcoming broader society. For many Muslim girls in France, national identity serves as a symbolic passport, providing a means to cross the boundaries between their communities and mainstream French society, which often views ethnic populations with suspicion (Nickerson, 2019). This national identity is not simply a label; it shifts in meaning depending on context, reflecting the fluidity of cultural belonging. ...
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... When media reinforce negative or inaccurate narratives it can strengthen negative intergroup attitudes. For example, the media's repeated linking of Islam and terrorism is an example of how religion may be used to perpetuate prejudicial attitudes toward those seeking asylum (Chen et al., 2023;Muller, 2016;Nickerson, 2019). Threat perception at the media and political macrolevel thus can influence the communities in which young refugees settle and create potential hostile intergroup contact. ...
Refugee Oppression in Media and Politics: Vicarious Trauma, Burnout, and Opportunities to Thrive in Refugee Advocates
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Within Australia, there is incongruence between individual microlevel attitudes toward forcibly displaced people, and macrolevel attitudes within the media and politics. Seeking the lived experience of refugee advocates, the current study explores the perceived impact of macrolevel attitudes on the well-being of advocates and the wider community. Method: A purposive sample of 10 refugee advocates participated in semistructured interviews which were then transcribed verbatim. Scripts were analyzed individually and jointly as per the protocols of interpretative phenomenological analysis. Results: One superordinate group experiential theme emerged from the analysis, kyriarchal system of oppression, acknowledging the intersections of oppression within macro societal power structures. The theme conveys paternal, patriarchal, racial, and imperialistic oppression and overarches six subordinate themes: political and systemic cruelty, dominant group thinking, media as mediator, advocacy overwhelm and burnout, shattered schemas, and opportunity to thrive. Discussion/Conclusion: The findings of this study prompt debate regarding the critical issue of migration and refugees and how discord between personal views, media, and political commentary have the potential to influence mental distress at many levels of society. For these participants, vicarious exposure to trauma and discord between their own and macroattitudes toward the extreme distress of refugee and asylum seeker populations for whom they cared, precipitated susceptibility to burnout and secondary traumatic stress. The findings provide pathways for future research including psychological risks to volunteers and advocates, and inform future policy and practice for successful refugee integration.
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Media Bias: News Coverage of International Terrorism and Implications for Youth Perceptions in the Arab Region
Article
  • May 2024
There is a need to emphasize the magnitude of the tragedies caused by the war on terror by drawing viewers’ attention toward terrorist groups’ terrible activities on social media sites for awareness and understanding. The present study aims to assess the perceptions of youth towards the coverage of international terrorism through social media. The random sampling technique was used to recruit 1020 participants from 22 Arab states. The study revealed that social media sites broadcast international terrorism news that has an impact on the Arab region where Islam is represented as the prime mover behind those acts of terror. The majority believed that the coverage of the Arab media, in comparison with the international media, was much more impartial. No statistical difference was observed between gender and dependency on the news on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). The findings also showed that raising awareness of Arab youth is needed to develop their media literacy and their independent analysis of biased coverage of social media in order to prevent radicalization.
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Framing Faith and Fear: Muslim Religious Scholars Perspectives on Media Representation of Terrorism in Kenya
Article
Full-text available
  • Sep 2024
This study investigated the perceptions of Muslim religious scholars on media representation of terrorism in Kenya. Kenya presents a unique context for the study because of its diverse religious landscape, its specific experiences with terrorism and upsurge of digital platforms for news dissemination. Muslim scholars in Kenya, therefore, play a critical role within Muslim communities as they look after their congregation. The phenomenological theory was used as a framework for the study. The study found that there was a general perception among Muslim religious scholars that media representation of terrorism was biased towards the Muslim population. The scholars are of the view that Muslims were labelled as terrorists, terrorism sponsors or sympathizers. As a result, the religious scholars had become reluctant to consume Kenyan media products, and some of them had disconnected from various media platforms. There is need for guidelines and policies that recognize the place and the sensitivities of the Muslim population in terrorism reporting in Kenya to improve media representation of terrorism, and as well as differentiating between Islam and terrorism, as part of the guidelines, and training journalists on their implementation
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What’s in a Name
Chapter
  • Sep 2024
If we start with the notion that naming an entity already attributes specific characteristics to it, we can assume that calling someone or a group of people Muslim already triggers all the stereotypical ideas one has about the people of that religion. In addition, as the religious denominator itself is charged with multiple connotations, its mere mentioning triggers all these associations in all their possible variations. “What’s in a Name” views the positive and negative references used for Muslims and the associations these provoke and then compares the findings from the manually collected corpora of media articles to the results provided by online corpora.
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Self-fulfilling Prophecy and Muslim Radicalization: Cases of France and the United States
Article
  • Jun 2024
This paper investigates the relationship between radicalization and self-fulfilling prophecy, focusing on the Western contexts with case studies from France and the United States. In France, historical marginalization and "symbolic ghettoization" of Muslim immigrants created an "in-group" versus "out-group" dynamic, intensified by political actions and media portrayals, leading to alienation and radicalization among young Muslim men. Similarly, in the United States, conservative media narratives post-9/11 have portrayed Muslims as threats, influencing public opinion and policy decisions, and setting the stage for potential future radicalization. The paper emphasizes the formation of these restrictive identities pushes marginalized individuals towards radicalism, underscoring the need to reject prejudices for effective radicalization mitigation. It warns of the dangers of symbolic segregation, highlighting the importance of understanding and addressing self-fulfilling prophecies in political and media discourse to combat radicalization in contemporary societies.
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Media representation of Muslims and Islam from 2000 to 2015: A meta-analysis
Article
Full-text available
  • Jun 2016
This article reports a meta-analysis of 345 published studies to examine the media’s role in construction of a Muslim and Islamic identity. A quantitative analysis highlights the geographical focus, methods, theories, authorship, media types, and time frames of published studies. A qualitative analysis investigated the most prominent researched themes. Our findings suggest that a large majority of studies covered Western countries, while Muslim countries and Muslim media have been neglected. We also identified an evident lack of comparative research, a neglect of visuals, and a dearth of research on online media. We found that most studies investigated the themes of ‘migration’, ‘terrorism’, and ‘war’. Moreover, our meta-study shows that Muslims tend to be negatively framed, while Islam is dominantly portrayed as a violent religion. Implications of these findings are discussed.
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Security Threatened: Surveying Israeli Opinion on Peace and War
Book
  • Oct 1995
Public opinion has played a crucial role in the transitions from war to peace in Israel since the 1967 Six Day war. Security Threatened is the first major analysis of the interactions among opinion, politics and policy in that period, based on opinion surveys of thousands of adult Jews conducted between 1962 and 1994. The public divided during those years into militant hardliners and more conciliatory security positions, and power either shifted between, or was shared by, the Likud and Labour parties. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the onset of the intifada, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the American victory in the Gulf War, all segments of the Israeli public became more conciliatory. Policy initiatives reflected shifts in political power which in turn magnified changes in public opinion. Leaders were constrained by public opinion and by perceptions of threat, but they could also alter policy if they had the will because opinion was rather equally divided; since most people had their minds made up, the opposition could not block their policy.
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Who Are the Criminals?: The Politics of Crime Policy from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan
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  • Aug 2012
How did the United States go from being a country that tries to rehabilitate street criminals and prevent white-collar crime to one that harshly punishes common lawbreakers while at the same time encouraging corporate crime through a massive deregulation of business? Why do street criminals get stiff prison sentences, a practice that has led to the disaster of mass incarceration, while white-collar criminals, who arguably harm more people, get slaps on the wrist--if they are prosecuted at all? In Who Are the Criminals?, one of America's leading criminologists provides new answers to these vitally important questions by telling how the politicization of crime in the twentieth century transformed and distorted crime policymaking and led Americans to fear street crime too much and corporate crime too little. John Hagan argues that the recent history of American criminal justice can be divided into two eras--the age of Roosevelt (roughly 1933 to 1973) and the age of Reagan (1974 to 2008). A focus on rehabilitation, corporate regulation, and the social roots of crime in the earlier period was dramatically reversed in the later era. In the age of Reagan, the focus shifted to the harsh treatment of street crimes, especially drug offenses, which disproportionately affected minorities and the poor and resulted in wholesale imprisonment. At the same time, a massive deregulation of business provided new opportunities, incentives, and even rationalizations for white-collar crime--and helped cause the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. The time for moving beyond Reagan-era crime policies is long overdue, Hagan argues. The understanding of crime must be reshaped and we must reconsider the relative harms and punishments of street and corporate crimes. In a new afterword, Hagan assesses Obama's policies regarding the punishment of white-collar and street crimes and debates whether there is any evidence of a significant change in the way our country punishes them.
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The Collective Dynamics of Racial Dehumanization and Genocidal Victimization in Darfur
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  • Dec 2008
Sociologists empirically and theoretically neglect genocide. In this article, our critical collective framing perspective begins by focusing on state origins of race-based ideology in the mobilization and dehumanization leading to genocide. We elaborate this transformative dynamic by identifying racially driven macro-micro-macro-level processes that are theoretically underdeveloped and contested in many settings. We investigate generic processes by exploiting an unprecedented survey of refugees from the ongoing genocide in Darfur Our focus is on the Sudanese government crisis framing of a dehumanizing collective process. Sudanese forces joined with Janjaweed militia to attack black African settlements. They aggregated and concentrated racial epithets in a collective process of dehumanization anti organized terror which amplified the severity of genocidal victimization, the lethal and lasting scar of the genocidal state. Our findings question primordial and counter-insurgency explanations, while supporting aspects of the instrumental, population-resource, constructionist, and cognitive perspectives that form the foundation of our critical collective framing perspective. It has been more than 50 years since Sutherland famously added white-collar crime to public sociology, radically reordering discourse about crime. It is time to do the same with Raphael Lemkin concept of genocide.
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Communicating Terror: The Rhetorical Dimensions of Terrorism
Book
  • Jan 2010
The only book to examine terrorism as a rhetorical act "This is an excellent text in furthering our understanding of the web of language and how it creates our mediated realities - which reflect our culture, politics, religion, economics, etc. Students really like the case studies and how it complements the theory and practice of rhetoric. I think this book has applications for almost any course in communication." -J. Gregory Payne, Emerson College Concise, succinct, and provocative, Communicating Terror, Second Edition explores multiple rhetorical dimensions of terrorism, connects terrorism to communication theories, and helps readers understand how this violence creates a public discourse for multiple target audiences. Author Joseph S. Tuman uses fascinating case studies and examples as he explores both dissent terrorism and state terror and looks at terrorism from a communicative perspective. Presenting terrorism as a process of communication between terrorists and multiple audiences, this book examines a range of rhetorical components, including definitions and labels, symbolism in terrorism, the relationship between terror and the media, and public oratory about terrorism-by both victims of terrorism and terrorists themselves. New to the Second Edition Includes three new chapters on public address and speeches concerning terrorism, symbols and targets of terror, and terrorism, rhetorical theory, and mass media; Offers new examples, case studies, speeches, and topic coverage, including expanded coverage of the Internet and the "War on Terror;" new material on Iran, Cambodia, Rwanda, Hamas and Hezbollah, and dirty bombs; Provides expanded treatment of rhetoric and theory with a focus on ideological criticism, neo-classical criticism, dramatism, and media-centered terrorism; Examines diverse acts of terrorism-not just 9/11 or the recent events in the Middle East-to show the history and various usages of these acts as a medium for communication; Includes real case studies of terrorists and terror acts that make applying rhetorical theory practical and accessible. Intended Audience Communicating Terror, Second Edition is ideal for use in a wide range of courses, including Media & Politics, Terrorism, Media & Society, Rhetorical Theory/Analysis/Criticism, Defense and National Security, and Political Communication.
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