Islam in British media discourses

Understanding perceptions of Muslims in the news

Laurens de Rooij

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526135223
• eBook ISBN: 9781526135247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

Media reporting on Islam and Muslims commonly relate stories about terrorism, violence, or the lack of integration with western values and society. Yet there is little research into how non-Muslims engage with and are affected by these news reports. Inspired by the overtly negative coverage of Islam and Muslims by the mainstream press and the increase in Islamophobia across Europe, this book explores the influence of these depictions on the thoughts and actions of non-Muslims.Building on extensive fieldwork interviews and focus groups, Laurens de Rooij argues that individuals negotiate media reports to fit their existing outlook on Islam and Muslims. Non-Muslim responses to these reports, de Rooij argues, are not only (re)productions of local and personal contextuality, but are co-dependent and co-productive to the reports themselves.

1
Modes of production: British media as a discursive system

Unlike some topics presented in the media, which have been subjected to sustained academic analysis, research on the British media's representation of Islam is a recent phenomenon with important results.¹ Works in the broader context of the media treatment of religion, particularly “fundamentalism” have been increasing. Yet there has been little empirical research into the British media's treatment of religion and the influence it has on its potential audience(s), Al-Azami's analysis of the portrayal of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam being an exception.² Al-Azami looks at what members of a religion think about the portrayal of that religion. He uses several prompts to explore audience reactions. However, in his book, the prompts are somewhat divorced from their context of production. Therefore the findings from his focus groups are hard to judge, as the audience responses are merely the result of the prompts and are not discussed in relation to their general media usage. As the prompts are chosen by the author, with a lack of argumentation for why those prompts and not others, the prompts themselves might not be representative of the general media discourse in the UK media. This book addresses those issues through my study design, and gives further insight into the media representation of Islam, the consequences of its reception, and the construction of meaning(s) and understanding(s) based on those reports. This first chapter addresses two main themes: firstly, religion generally, and Islam specifically, and their respective relationships with the English media; secondly, it addresses how media constructions continue to shape assumptions about the nature of Islam, potentially guiding public attitudes towards (British) Muslims.

It is essential to consider how the media reflects and constructs social and cultural life, including public and private interests. In doing so, the media locates and defines the place of Islam in society, simultaneously producing and shaping public discourse.³ It is important to note, however, that in the contemporary age, media and religion are present in the same conceptual and practical spaces. This was not always the case in the past, and as a result one can see a development as religion has crossed a divide and now positions itself in the secular media space, both willingly and unwillingly.⁴ Recent works from sociologists, theologians, and religious studies scholars have produced research of theoretical and cultural significance on the changing relationship between religion and media, not overlooking the impact of new media on religion.⁵

Contemporary media, culture, and religion are the product of their relative histories and traditions. “If religion is inseparable from its mediation so that there is no unmediated religion against which we can measure contemporary practice, then religion exists in [the] symbiotic relationship to the media through which it is expressed.”⁶ Therefore media reveals something about religion in a particular context; it allows for engagement in rituals, and locates religion in media. However, contemporary mediated (religious) products are the result of negotiation, resistance, adaptation, and creative responses to issues over time. The scope of this book does not allow for research into this rich and storied history to be explored in detail here. The focus of this chapter is an analysis of how the news media in Britain functions today. Therefore, in order to allow for a detailed analysis of the subject of mediation (Islam and Muslims), the general history of media in Britain will only be referred to in relation to specific contemporary aspects. The aim is not to give a historical account of media, a history of religion in media, or to explore how media representations of religion have changed over time. Rather in exploring the current influence of media representations of Islam and Muslims on non-Muslims, an understanding of contemporary media must be provided, particularly as it relates to issues of discourse and discursive formation.⁷

This book employs Foucault's understanding of discourse,⁸ as suggested in the introduction, to analyse how media in Britain as a system of knowledge,⁹ engages with Islam. The British press is understood as one method for managing and producing Muslims in a political, sociological, ideological, and imaginative manner.¹⁰ As a consequence, these statements constitute how Muslims and Islam are perceived and can transform their audience's understanding of Muslims and Islam in accordance with the presupposed system of knowledge. As Knott and Mitchell state: “The symbolic resources that film, television, and other media offer are often appropriated and recycled as people attempt to define their own identities, narrate their own life stories and understand the traditions and communities of interpretation to which they belong.”¹¹

The first section of this chapter discusses the workings of a media institution. It offers an analysis of the workings of a media outlet, as one cannot begin to conceptualise the influence a media institution has on its reports and the audience if one does not understand where reports come from. Each report is the result of a production process that has its own context and historical narrative. By offering a description of media logic, form, and content, the description of how media reports come to be will help situate their reception within the overall functioning of media. The second section is a discussion of the relationship between media, ideology, and the political. The final two sections are an analysis of the economic implications of media and consumer practices, because, in order to situate the discursive functions of media within a social context, we must look at how media reports are consumed. Each of these spheres is key when considering the role of media in society today.

The workings of a media outlet

It would do a disservice to all media practitioners to speak of “The Media” as a homogenous group and to treat all journalism the same. Klaus Bruhn Jensen defines communication as: “the relaying of categorical information that can be recognised as information, and which can be recategorised – restated, responded to, or reprogrammed – in the course of communication.”¹² The relayed information is then received and negotiated by the receiver. Biocca describes this process as follows:

[Receivers] read into a message. … The word “read” implies an active engagement with the message. The meaning of a message is not “received”, it is extracted, inferred, worked on, and constructed. The audience member always “reads into” the message. … The viewers contain within them a range of possible decodings. To say this another way, a viewer's interpretation of the message is not fixed, it will vary with mood, the viewer's situation, and the programming context of the message.¹³

Where communication refers to the act of transmitting information, media is broadly defined as the method used to store and transmit information or data. However, in the present book, media is the term used for the mechanisms used to store and transmit information or data to large audiences simultaneously. Peter Horsfield further elaborates:

The most common use of the term media today is as a collective term for the constellation of institutions, practices, economic structures, and aesthetic styles of social utilities such as newspapers, movies, radio, book publishers, television, and the related creative industries (such as advertising, marketing, and graphic design) that service them.¹⁴

For the purpose of the current study the term media is commonly used synonymously with mass media in general or news media in particular. Even though in reality it may refer to a single medium used to communicate any data for any purpose, I will not be using that d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1 Modes of production: British media as a discursive system
• 2 Symbolic representations of Islam and Muslims
• 3 A dialectic of media theory and audience praxis
• 4 Examining the influence of current media portrayals of Islam and Muslims
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index