Images of Islam in the UK: the representation of British Muslims in the national print news media 2000-2008

Abstract

Our findings suggest that the coverage of British Muslims has increased significantly since \n2000, peaking in 2006, and remaining at high levels in 2007 and 2008. This rise is partly \nexplained by the increase in coverage devoted to terrorism and terrorism related stories - \n36% of stories about British Muslims overall are about terrorism. This is especially notable \nafter the terrorist attacks in the US and the UK in 2001 and 2005. \n \nIn recent years, however, we have seen the increasing importance of stories focusing on \nreligious and cultural differences between Islam and British culture or the West in general \n(22% of stories overall) or Islamic extremism (11% overall). Indeed, 2008 was the first year \nin which the volume of stories about religious and cultural differences (32% of stories by \n2008) overtook terrorism related stories (27% by 2008). Coverage of attacks on or problems \nfacing Muslims, on the other hand, has steadily declined as a proportion of coverage. In sum, \nwe found that the bulk of coverage of British Muslims - around two thirds - focuses on \nMuslims as a threat (in relation to terrorism), a problem (in terms of differences in values) or \nboth (Muslim extremism in general).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 149 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.