Muslims and the News Media

Elizabeth Poole, John E. Richardson, Elizabeth Poole, John E. Richardson

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781845111717
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857737502
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Muslims have featured in many of the more significant news stories of the past few years - yet shockingly very few of these stories have been about anything other than the 'war on terror'. This urgently relevant book examines the role and representations of Muslims in the news media, particularly within a climate of threat, fear and misunderstanding. Written by both academic authorities and media practitioners, "Muslims and the News Media" is designed as a comprehensive and critical textbook and is set in both the British and international context. Bringing together a range of insightful perspectives on the subject into a coherent whole, the book clearly establishes the links between context, content, production and audiences, thus reflecting the entire cycle of the communication process. It reveals both the ways in which meaning is produced and reproduced in the news media, and the ways in which audiences themselves, both Muslim and non-Muslim, use or consume this media. Significant too and discussed here is the role of Muslims themselves in the processes of news production.
Clarifying the circumstances and politics surrounding the representation of Muslims across a range of journalistic genres, "Muslims and the News Media" provides crucial insights into the representation - and misrepresentation - of Islam and Muslims today.

Part 1

Context, Politics and Production

1.	New Labour, Multiculturalism and the Media in Britain
	Siobhan Holohan

In recent years the term multiculturalism has been embraced in Western societies who want to build cultures of tolerance and equality for all citizens. Contemporary British politicians, regardless of their party affiliation, would be foolish to ignore the needs and desires of any group able to cast a vote. For this reason politicians now regard the rhetoric of multiculturalism as an essential component of their everyday speech. What is more, this trend towards outward expressions of inclusiveness has not gone unnoticed by the media, who increasingly report on the wonderful diversity of multicultural Britain. Indeed the picture that is often painted about contemporary Britain is one that suggests that, despite its problems, our society is heading in the right direction. In response to this position there have been several attempts to locate the idealistic concept of multiculturalism in public policy, most notably in the 2000 Race Relations (Amendment) Act, which came about after criticisms of institutional racism outlined in the Macpherson Report (1999) and the Parekh Report (2000), which attempted to point a way forward towards a truly multi-ethnic society. But what is actually revealed when we take a closer look at the discourse of difference? What does multiculturalism mean to the various groups competing for recognition in today’s chaotic public sphere?

World events such as the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and the war in Iraq have highlighted just how fragile cross-cultural relations continue to be in our global society. Instead of the harmonious existence portrayed in a good deal of contemporary political and media rhetoric, we are witnessing a far more antagonistic relationship between British ‘insiders’ and those who still exist on the fringes of white British society by virtue of visible religious, cultural, or ethnic difference. Attempts by the press to deny the hostile relationship between white and minority ethnic Britons simply underscores the reality that tensions really do exist. Therefore, in an effort to unravel the myths from the realities, this chapter seeks to trace the discourse of self/other relations within the context of New Labour’s politics and the push by media agencies to present an image of harmony in contemporary Britain.

The Roots of Race Relations in Great Britain

It is a common myth that the population of Britain has ever been united in terms of ethnicity, religion or culture. Historically people have migrated either to escape trouble or in search of work. In Britain ethnic populations have always contributed to the building of the nation state. For instance the historical period immediately after the Second World War saw migrant labour welcomed into Britain in order to help boost the post-war economy. Yet until quite recently it was considered acceptable to divide people in terms of perceived racial difference. In the post-war years the British Empire was still fresh in public consciousness. White Britain could ‘open its doors’ precisely because it believed that the new entrants were second-class citizens brought in to fill the jobs that no one else wanted. As a result of this popular imaginary the nation could be safe in the knowledge that generosity to its colonial cousins could not possibly backfire on its own citizens. The idea that white people were somehow naturally more intelligent and better suited to superior jobs discounted the idea that the new immigrant workforce would ever achieve more than their colour allowed (Anthias and Yuval-Davies 1992).

But race relations took a turn for the worse as various ethnic populations began to form separate communities in order to avoid harassment. Although driven to this strategy of group formation by overt discrimination in housing and work opportunities, the white working-class population, buoyed by political flag waving and press scaremongering, saw large communities of blacks and Asians as a threat to their British way of life. In 1968 Conservative MP Enoch Powell notoriously sought to exploit this fear of the other. His inflammatory ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which was critical of the perceived privileges afforded to the ‘Commonwealth immigrant’ under proposed amendments to the 1965 Race Relations Act, further aggravated the antagonism between cultures:

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.

While Powell was widely condemned by political leaders and sacked from his position in the shadow cabinet, his views were symptomatic of a wider discontent that followed the decline of secure white identity. It was against this turbulent backdrop that the first Race Relations Acts in 1965 and 1968 gave ethnic minorities the legal authority to protest against overt discrimination in the workplace, education and housing. In this regard the Acts gave some definition to the debate about how migrants to Britain should integrate into majority society. Nevertheless, following the experience of socio-political racism throughout the 1960s and 1970s, black activists in Britain wanted to maintain race as a privileged site of political struggle. Within this framework the category of race worked as a discursive reminder of power relations and inequality in Britain in order to provide a platform for social and political criticism.

According to this idea writers such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy sought to apply a New Left model of critical theory to reveal how discourse worked to maintain social inequality. After Hall et al.’s (1978) earlier attempts to theorise ethnic conflict using the example of mugging, Hall and Jacques (1983) expanded the idea of antagonism in The Politics of Thatcherism. In this work they explained how the political ideology of market forces promoted by Margaret Thatcher’s administration allowed racism to flourish under the discourse of equality. The paradox of this situation was that it was precisely the politics that sought to universalise difference that sustained ethnic conflict. That is to say that ethnic difference became the most basic form of identification for groups of people who felt that they had no identity under market capitalism.

The urban street protests that flared up in the 1980s took place in response to Thatcher’s increased emphasis on a law and order state. The common identification of the protests as ‘riots’ followed the logic of the Conservative’s zero tolerance policy on domestic insurgence. According to writers such as Benyon and Solomos (1987) black protesters, aggrieved by increased police ‘stop and search’ powers that targeted their communities, were portrayed as criminals bent on violence and destruction. Supported by widespread press coverage of the protests as evidence of mass deviance, the legal and cultural criminalisation of urban blacks was able to pass off without too much opposition. For a time racism continued to exist beneath the surface of British society. Apart from occasional eruptions of violence, which came to highlight racial antagonism, ethnic conflict became dispersed into ordinary everyday life where it was normalised as an accepted part of social relations. For this reason anti-racists thought it important to continue to draw attention to the racism beneath the surface of popular representation rather than allow the myth of a multicultural harmony with occasional bouts of individual violence to persist unchecked.

The Multicultural Dilemma

Since the demise of what Kundnani (2000) has called ‘Thatcher’s monocultural society’ and the rise of Blair’s multicultural imaginary, critical anti-racism seems to have been discarded in favour of theories of difference adequate to the reality of the global market. Whereas the idea of anti-racism is to attack racism through its opposite (anti-racism), the postmodern theory of multiculturalism seeks to move beyond the idea of self/other opposition to embrace the politics of cultural difference. For this reason the postmodern understanding of identity, put forward by authors such as Charles Taylor (1994), can be seen to refer to policy adopted by countries such as Canada and Australia in the 1970s. In these countries multicultural policies were introduced to back the attempt to promote polyethnicity (Kymlicka 1995). In this sense multiculturalism meant that (white) migrant settlers could, indeed should, maintain their specific cultural identity, rather than adopt the cultural signifiers of the host nation. This new socio-political agenda insisted upon an ethic that was inclusive of all, and privileged none. No one religious, cultural or ethnic group could be seen to benefit over another, but rather everyone would gain by merit. Embracing this ideology of mass democracy, multiculturalism suggests that all cultures are different but equal.

Thus, theoretical multiculturalism evolved from the recognition that we are all different. This recognition became a criticism of the essentialism of the racist/anti-racist binary, which, according to theorists who advocate difference, merely replicated constructions of race. Outwardly this position grounds Hall’s (1992) identification of the mythologies that show the idea of race to be the naturalisation of cultural difference. Hall’s argument is that in order successfully to create the subject of the nation state, national identities must be formed around what Benedict Anderson (1983) previously called ‘imagined communities’. Here, identity is constructed around a set of shared, or collective, myths about how the nation was formed in order to illicit patriotism and allegiance to that nation. However, Canadian political theorist Will Kymlicka (1995) explains that such shared myths, which are adopted by state institutions as discursive tools for interpolating subjects, also work to separate those that do not adhere to the current rules of nationality. In other words, the idea of the insider always creates an outsider.

Against the construction of identity around national myths, which work to exclude those who pursue different cultural practices, multiculturalism puts forward an ideology that embraces difference. For Hall this can be observed in the formation of new identities where the ‘oscillation between Tradition and Translation’ (Hall 1992: 310) produces hybrid identities peculiar to the time and place in which they occur. In these communities people may remain close to their cultural roots, but also take on characteristics of the place in which they now reside. Hall imagines that this hybrid identity might take on the history and character of several different national and religious cultures that have been thrust together by post-colonial migrations. Multiculturalism therefore promotes difference above national identity and its exclusionary structures. In this respect it is also, like postmodernism, against the idea of a unified nation state.

However, it is clear that in many ways the idea of multiculturalism reflects the central tension of contemporary politics. How is it possible to reconcile the demands of multiculturalism and a globalised economy and uphold the demands of the nation state that confers authority on the political representatives who must try to negotiate the tension that is constitutive of this global/nation bind? Their very positions as elected representatives of nation states mean that contemporary politicians are faced with the conundrum that multiculturalism can never really embrace the idea of the cosmopolitan individual, because this would mean the collapse of their own national territories.

New Labour and Postmodern Politics

When New Labour was elected to government after eighteen years of Conservative rule it appeared to signal a change in momentum for British society. After Thatcher, John Major’s Conservative government had made attempts at modernisation by introducing an ideology that centred on moderate conservatism. According to this ideology Major sought to water down the old style antagonism characteristic of the class politics that had previously been the focus of Tory rule. While in speeches to the Tory faithful he maintained the national myth of ‘warm beer and cricket on the village green’, by affirming his own Brixton roots Major also sought to emphasise the meritocratic nature of British society. His implication was that in 1990s Britain anybody could make it, regardless of their class, gender or ethnic background. The political purpose of this affirmation of the American ideology of a meritocratic society was to expand the Thatcherite strategy that sought to fragment mass political opposition.

However, Major’s extension of Thatcher’s strategy was a failure. Whereas the working classes could understand Thatcher’s idealisation of hard work, achievement and lawfulness in terms of her shopkeeper roots, Major’s attempt to broaden this strategy to Britain’s ethnic population was unbelievable. While Thatcher could pass for the austere working-class matron bent on self-betterment, Major could never pass for a young black man from Brixton. Instead his attempt to connect to Britain’s non-white population came to emphasise the gulf between conservatism and the minority ethnic population.

At the same time as conservatism started to lose its credibility, Labour made a more successful pitch to the newly fragmented British electorate. Following their third straight electoral defeat, socialism was consigned to the dustbin of history. Neil Kinnock, the figure who seemed to epitomise traditional working-class identity through his Welsh roots, was also cast aside. In order to replace socialism and Kinnock, Labour became New Labour; socialism became third-way politics; Kinnock became Blair. Where Major and the Conservatives had failed to replace the haves/have nots political terrain with a universal middle-class model, Tony Blair and New Labour were successful.

In terms of Britain’s minority ethnic population, the end of strict state control and the embrace of a neo-liberal market philosophy meant that certain pillars of British migration law had to be taken down in order to afford greater freedom of movement. New Labour started to dismantle clauses in British migrant settlement law upon their arrival in office (Back et al. 2002). For example, the ‘primary purpose’ law, which stopped foreigners from marrying British citizens to settle in the UK, was repealed. The purpose of this reform was to slacken border controls. Whereas such reform would have been problematic for the Conservatives, who remained the party of landed wealth, the gradual lowering of border controls was seen to be essential by New Labour. According to their economic policy such measures were necessary to improve Britain’s relation to the global economy. Such moves could increase economic efficiency at home, but also enable what Bauman (2000) has called the liquid class to be more successful in their international transactions. From this point of view it is possible to see why the late 1990s became New Labour’s multicultural years. Multiculturalism was a signifier of Britain’s embrace of the political ideas of social inclusion, individualism, meritocracy and the globalisation of economic forces. Each of these innovations took place under the watchful eye of the caring, hands-off state.

The fly in the ointment for New Labour’s utopic vision stemmed from incidences of racial violence left over from Tory rule. However, turning a problem into an advantage was simple for New Labour’s professional spin doctors, who were able to turn an event that should have been an indicator of the existence of racism into an episode that could illustrate the multicultural idealism of New Britain. Consequently the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence was repackaged as a leftover of a Britain divided by class and race. In contrast to the racism of old Britain, ‘Cool Britannia’ became an image of a nation united by a common multi-culture. The icons of Cool Britannia, such as pop groups Oasis and the Spice Girls, were mass cultural figures that could transcend boundaries of race, class and gender and therefore show how Britain was a truly inclusive society at the turn of the new millennium. Arguably the case of Stephen Lawrence exemplified this movement towards multiculturalism due to the ‘acceptable’ characteristics of the Lawrence family (Holohan 2005). The case had stagnated under the Conservatives. However, under New Labour Lawrence became a sign of multicultural Britain, whereas his accused killers became symbolic of the racial violence we needed to leave behind.

The turning point for race relations came when, four years after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the new Home Secretary, Jack Straw, instigated an inquiry into the investigation by the Metropolitan Police under the direction of Sir William Macpherson. After the failure to convict anyone for the crime, Lawrence’s parents were vocal in their condemnation of the investigation. In this regard the case had been problematic for the press who were faced with the family of a murdered black man accusing Britain of being racist. However, unlike previous conflictual relations between the press and black Britons, the Lawrences were able to effect a campaign that ce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1. Context, Politics and Production
• Part 2. Media Output
• Part 3. Audience Practices
• Notes
• References
• Backcover