Negativity in the US Media’s Coverage of Muslims: Topics, Trends, and Frames

• In Event: Ingroups and Outgroups in the News

Abstract

A substantial body of survey research has shown that Muslims are consistently viewed less favorably than other groups in American society. The media have been a prominent source of information about Muslims, with more Americans learning about Muslims from the media than from any other source. Media exposure to Muslims is linked not only to negative perceptions, but also to greater support for civil restrictions of Muslim Americans as well as military action in Muslim countries. While a number of scholars have examined just how negative the coverage of Muslims is overall, much remains to be learned about the content of this negative coverage, as well as about changes over time in this content.

Such information is of considerable empirical and theoretical interest, as it speaks to the validity of different explanations for negative coverage, as well as to the likely implications of major events for the tone of coverage. For example, it has been argued that negative coverage is to be expected given frequent Muslim involvement in terrorist acts; in this case, negative coverage may be nothing more than a reflection of the topic being covered. If, on the other hand coverage is negative across subjects that do not themselves have negative associations, the implications become significantly different.

In this paper, we apply topic modeling — an algorithmic approach to identifying key topics in a set of texts — to a corpus of more than 250,000 newspaper articles from 17 national and regional US newspapers since 1996, along with thousands of transcripts of the major U.S. television news programs, all of which mention Islam or Muslims. Combining this with automated sentiment analysis (calibrated against a representative corpus of randomly selected newspaper texts) allows us to shed new light on which topics are most salient in the media coverage of Muslims, as well as on which topics most contribute to the overall negative tone of coverage. In addition, a more fine-grained analysis allows us to identify just how particular topics are discussed and framed positively or negatively.

The results will improve our understanding of what factors drive negative media coverage and how those factors may have changed over time. Moreover, the findings will speak not just to the specific case of media coverage of Muslims, but also to the validity of different types of explanations of the tone of media coverage in general.

Authors

• A. Maurits van der Veen, College of William & Mary

• Erik J. Bleich, Middlebury College