1. What Did 9/11 Mean for U.S. Media Coverage of Muslims and Islam?
- Author:
- A. Maurits van der Veen and Erik Bleich
- Publication Date:
- 09-2021
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Brown Journal of World Affairs
- Institution:
- Brown Journal of World Affairs
- Abstract:
- The twentieth anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks is an opportune moment to review the impact of those attacks on the U.S. media’s coverage of Muslims and Islam. In 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney famously argued that “[i]n a sense, 9/11 changed everything for us.”1 Evidence suggests that—within the U.S. government—“everything” includes how officials perceive Muslims; they became the target of wide, undifferentiated suspicion.2 The picture for the U.S. media is less clear-cut: some have argued that, as within the govern- ment, the attacks “thrust a certain type of Orientalist stereotype firmly back... into our news media, and into the mouths of politicians.”3 Meanwhile, others have found an “increase in sympathetic representations of Arab and Muslim Americans in the U.S. media after 9/11.”4 In our own research, we find two key changes after 9/11: an enduring rise in the number of newspaper articles about Muslims and Islam and a dramatic increase in the share of articles linking Muslims to terrorism or extremism.
- Topic:
- Islam, Media, News Analysis, and 9/11
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America