A new study of how the media covers minorities in the United States finds that depictions of Muslims in the news remain by far the most frequent and the most negative.
Erik Bleich, director of the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project Lab at Vermont’s Middlebury College, thinks the finding of this study is “pretty amazing.” It shouldn’t be; the reason for this is obvious. Bleich’s wonderment is akin to stating that it is “amazing” and a mystery why Germany and Germans were reported about negatively more than any other country or people during World War II. Not all Germans were Nazis, but it is also obvious why Germany and Nazism would be reported about negatively in nations that opposed the spread of Nazism.
It is the same today: the global jihad is abusive, totalitarian and aggressively expansionist. Jihad terror is real, and has a 1,400-year history.
In the news business, whoever is committing the most crimes and upheaval, regardless of race or religion, are most reported about, even as the media does its best to obfuscate the ideological roots of the global jihad.
In the study:
Researchers also found that just 2% of articles covering Muslims mentioned Islamophobia or anti-Muslim sentiment and 3% of articles explicitly noted anti-Muslim hate crimes. In contrast, 17% of Jewish articles mentioned anti-Semitism.
All genuine “hate crimes” are wrong. There is, however, no comparison between “Islamophobia” — which is a label used of legitimate and justified criticism of Islam — and the longstanding scourge of antisemitism, which is pure hatred against Jews only because they are Jewish.
“Report: News coverage of Muslims is more negative than of other minority groups,” by Aysha Khan, Religion News Service, September 4, 2019:
(RNS) — A new study of how the media covers minorities in the United States finds that depictions of Muslims in the news remain by far the most frequent and the most negative.
“Muslims are just way down there in comparison to the other groups,” said Erik Bleich, director of the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project Lab at Vermont’s Middlebury College. “It’s pretty amazing.”
The lab’s report, released Tuesday (Sept. 3), analyzes 26,626 articles mentioning African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Jews and Muslims that were published in 2018 in four national newspapers — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
About 9,000 of those articles mentioned Islam or Muslims, which constituted more than a third of the total articles analyzed.
The second-most-covered minority group were African Americans, who were the subject of about 6,500 articles. Jews were mentioned in nearly 6,000 articles, of which the average tone was neutral.
Researchers scored each article on how positive or negative it was, then compared the average result for each group to the average U.S. newspaper story.
Any score above 0.5 or below -0.5 denoted clearly positive or negative connotations, respectively. Coverage of Muslims was averaged out to -0.7, a number Bleich called “striking.”
Foreign reporting, which more often involves coverage of violent conflict or Islamist groups, was a major factor of negativity for articles covering Muslims. …