“Critical Review of the Research Paper.

Assignment:
“Critical Review of the Research Paper.
Islamophobia nd Media:
“Islamophobia in the media refers to negative coverage of Islam-related topics, Muslims, or Arabs by media outlets in a way that is hostile, untrue, and/or misleading. Islamophobia is defined as “Intense dislike or fear of Islam, especially as a political force; hostility or prejudice towards Muslims”, and the study of how and to what extent the media furthers Islamophobia has been the subject of much academic and political discussion. Discussion of Islamophobia in the media is typically concerned with patterns of rhetoric employed either by a specific outlet or by the mass media of a particular country or area, such as the United States or Europe. Examples of this include disproportionate negative coverage of Islam compared to other religions, association of Muslims with terrorism, portrayal of Islam and its adherents as violent or primitive, and exclusion of Muslim perspectives from political and academic discussion, among other topics. In turn, responses to discussions of media Islamophobia often question the frequency, severity, and impact of rhetoric deemed Islamophobic, what constitutes Islamophobia in practice, and the political motivations behind discussions about Islamophobia.
There have been various instances in the media about how the Muslim community are often misrepresented to society, mostly in a way that centers heavily on terrorism, and paints Islam with a very broad brush.[original research? This is something that is seen in two major magazines, Newsweek and Time, which have been covering relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan over the last decade. Both of these publications distributed twenty leading articles that depicted about 57% of negative coverage in regards to current events in Afghanistan, about 37% neutral coverage, and only around 6% was positive information.This negative content would often consist of excessive mentioning of Al-Qaida and the Taliban, mistreatment of women, the recruitment of terrorists, etc. Numerous studies confirmed that the frequent repetition of a fact people might be convinced of it even if it is wrong, and this is called Illusory truth effect.
Studies have shown that over three-quarters of people in Western societies rely on the mass media, mainly television, as their primary source of information about Islam and Muslims.The Washington Post completed a study to examine newspapers’ coverage of Muslims compared to Catholics, Jews, and Hindus.The study first established a baseline for neutrality by analyzing 48,000 newspapers from various US newspapers between 1996 and 2015. Next the study analyzed 850,000 articles of which about 28% mentioned “Muslim” or “Islam”, about 41% that mentioned “Catholic”, about 29% that mentioned “Jew”, and about 2% that mentioned “Hindu”.This study found that 78% of all the articles that mentioned “Muslim” or “Islam” were negative in comparison ”with only 40 percent of those about Catholics, 46 percent about Jews, and 49 percent about Hindus.The study further filtered the content by cross referencing with articles that included “terrorism,” “extremism,” “radicalism,” “fundamentalism,” or “fanaticism,” “or their variants”.This revealed articles that contain terrorism and extremism words are more negative than those that do not.However, 69% of articles that do not contain references to terrorism and extremism were still negative.When the study removed articles with a mention of a foreign country “54 percent are negative, compared with only 37 percent of articles about Catholics, 36 percent of articles about Jews, and only 29 percent of articles about Hindus under similar conditions”.The narrative of the Western civilization being superior to its Islamic counterpart has been articulated into a binary of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. The media has pushed this narrative to the centre of the global conversation about Islam. Muslims believe that the Western media has been unfair to them, with the result that their second and third generations align themselves more with the global Muslim community.
Before any policy to address Islamophobia is worked out, it is important to have a proper understanding of the media’s role in spawning it. The establishment of a TV channel should be followed by research institutes and think tanks that are capable of generating ideas that can clarify misconceptions and win the battle of hearts and minds.
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