Media On Islamophobia

Islamophobia and Media

Written by Anis Adrina Md Nor

The contemporary perception of people especially Western people towards Islam have been negative as there are a lot of media reports on Muslims’ hostile acts. During the event when there is any terrorists attack, people would immediately relate it with Muslims and Islam although the fact about the attack is unclear.

The prejudice against Muslim started even before the 9/11 attacks in the United States, however, the events and other violence actions by terrorists after that period has caused an increase in anti-Muslim attitudes in many countries. This anti-Muslim sentiment also has been contributed by the modern media framing of Islam where Muslims are pictured primarily as dangerous, hostile,

For instance a study found that The Australian is the most frequent to identify Islam as ‘problem’ in which 30 percent of the articles in the publication portrayed Islam as a ‘problem’. Further more, in the media, Islam and violence are linked widely with the most of the emphasis are characterised by mixing the terrorism and Islam (Anderson, 2015).

Considering the media effect to the public’s mind, it can create the perception of the Western people about Islam as the mass media of the West where the journalists who cover about Muslim world possess very little information about Islam and developed a distorted image of Islam which later adopted in Western culture. The word selection that described Muslims as extremist and terrorists which is misleading and mainly anti-Muslim is the major factor contributing the stereotype of

Islamophobia is also due to the misinformation about Muslims to the Western public via the images on many forms of media and Muslims are often labelled as terrorists and this has become a usual image to public that Muslims are terrorists.

Another factor that is often to be overlooked as contributor to the rise of Islamophobia is the length of news slot that is dedicated in covering radicalisation and trrorism. Islamophobia is always discussed in the setting of the debate of how Muslims and Islams are presented in the media.

Mainstream news outlets like CNN would provide half of its airtime in an hour of news reports to discuss the Muslim violence and radicalisation. The time spent to reports on the Islam matters can influence people’s mind as it has the priming effect, where, people will think that the issue is important based on its number of