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Abstract
To better understand the public portrayal of minorities, we propose a new and systematic procedure for measuring the standing of different groups that relies on the tone of daily newspaper headlines containing the names of minority groups. This paper assesses the portrayal of Muslims in the British print media between 2001 and 2012, focusing especially on testing scholarly propositions that Muslims are depicted in a systematically negative way. We compare the tone of newspaper headlines across time and across newspaper type and compare the portrayal of Muslims to that of Jews and Christians. We do not find support for arguments that Muslims are consistently portrayed in a negative manner in the British media as a whole. However, our data demonstrate that headlines in right-leaning newspapers are more negative than those in left-leaning newspapers, and that Muslims are consistently portrayed more negatively than Jews and frequently more negatively than Christians. These findings thus offer a more nuanced understanding of British newspaper portrayals of Muslims than exists in the contemporary scholarly literature.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Rodney Benson, Irene Bloemraad, Alex Caviedes, Els de Graauw, Dan Hallin, Rebecca Hamlin, Michael Brady Munnik and Maurits van der Veen for thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article. The lead author thanks Alec Cooper and Chad Sonn for research assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
[1] While not asserting that media portrayals of Muslims are positive, it is worth noting that some scholars have found that claims about Muslims in the British press are not largely negative (Carol and Koopmans Citation2013, 185; Vanparys, Jacobs, and Torrekens Citation2013, 217), and that the type of Muslim voice represented in the British media as of the mid-2000s has gone ‘beyond angry Muslims’ (Meer, Dwyer, and Modood Citation2010).
[2] Other recent immigrant groups such as Hindus or Sikhs are not covered frequently enough to permit reliable analysis.
[3] Data from the Office of National Statistics: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/key-statistics-for-local-authorities-in-england-and-wales/rpt-religion.html, accessed 28 November 2014.
[4] Chong and Druckman (Citation2007, 120–121) draw a parallel distinction between ‘citizens without sufficiently developed attitudes’ who can be ‘routinely manipulated by alternative framings’ and ‘citizens whose attitudes are held so tightly that they seek only to reinforce existing views’.
[5] The CEO of the Newspaper Association of America notes that the New York Times tweets its headlines to 9.5 million followers. See http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/newspapers-more-relevant-than-ever-before-b99112179z1-226211941.html, accessed 1 December 2014.
[6] Statistics from the National Readership Survey, available at http://www.nrs.co.uk/, accessed 28 November 2014.
[7] Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery (Citation2013, 7) note that some refer to the Daily Mail as a ‘middle-market’ paper because it has longer articles, more coverage of politics and a more formal writing style than other tabloids. At the same time, they argue that it has a ‘“tabloid” world view’.
[8] Each headline was also coded for the type of story (political, economic, cultural, etc.); whether or not it included elements of conflict or controversy; whether or not it was related to terrorism; whether or not it was related to women's issues; and for the geographic location associated with the headline.
[9] Data from the Office of National Statistics: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/key-statistics-for-local-authorities-in-england-and-wales/rpt-religion.html, accessed 28 November 2014.
[10] We analysed portrayals in stories about foreign and domestic Muslims in our data-set and found no statistically significant differences among them.
[11] Data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations available at: http://media.theguardian.com/presspublishing/table/0,,2012198,00.html, accessed 28 November 2014. With the growth of online readership, another way to assess overall exposure is through data from the UK's National Readership Survey, which offers a combined estimate of print and online readership. According to this yardstick, in 2013, almost 12 million people read the Daily Mail, almost 8 million read the Daily Mirror, approximately 5.2 million read the Guardian and 4.9 million read the Daily Telegraph (all figures include Sunday equivalents: http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/uk-newspapers-ranked-total-readership-print-and-online, accessed 28 November 2014). This means that readership for right-leaning newspapers (16.9 million total) outweighs that for left-leaning papers (13.2 million total) by approximately 3.7 million. However, without access to these data across all of the years in our study, and without being certain that the print and online headlines are precisely the same, we opted to use print circulation figures for our weighting analysis.
[12] We used January 2007 circulation figures from the Guardian as a baseline and multiplied headline counts for other papers by the greater readership ratio that each paper had at the mid-point of our timeline. The Daily Telegraph readership was 2.4 times that of the Guardian; the Daily Mirror readership was 4.3 times greater; and the Daily Mail had 6.2 times as many readers as the Guardian.
[13] Daily Telegraph, 8 September 2001; Daily Telegraph, 17 November 2003; Guardian, 30 October 2011.
[14] Daily Telegraph, 23 August 2005.
[15] Guardian, 2 December 2002.
[16] Mail on Sunday, 22 October 2006.
[17] Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2010.
[18] Daily Mirror, 20 December 2005.