[Peace-discuss] News-Gazette: Study: Media quicker to label Muslims than whites as terrorists

[Robert Naiman]

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2015-06-23/study-media-quicker-label-muslims-whites-terrorists.html

Study: Media quicker to label Muslims than whites as terrorists
Tue, 06/23/2015 - 7:00am | Julie Wurth

Between 2008 and 2012, about 6 percent of domestic terrorism suspects were
Muslim, or about 1 in 17, according to FBI reports.

But in that same period, about 81 percent of the domestic terrorists
described on national cable and network television news programs were
Muslim, according to a study led by University of Illinois communication
professor Travis Dixon.

Terrorism on American soil is much more likely to be committed by white
males with extremist views, a fact driven home in last week's church
shooting that killed nine people in Charleston, S.C., Dixon said Monday.

But some people in the news industry still resisted calling it a terrorist
attack, he said.

"Even the news agencies that did discuss it as a terrorist act posed it as
a question," he said.

It was a terrorist attack by definition, Dixon said: "Someone who kills
civilians for political goals. That's clearly what emerged here, without a
doubt."

A Facebook page with the name of the suspect, Dylann Storm Roof, showed him
wearing a jacket with flags from apartheid-era South Africa and the former
white-ruled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Friends told reporters that Roof had
said "blacks were taking over the world" and he wanted to start a civil
war. News accounts said he declared his hatred for black people before
opening fire. And a reported manifesto that surfaced online is full of
bigoted rants against black people and other minorities.

Some news accounts and commentators described it as an assault against
Christians "because he walked into a church and killed Christians," Dixon
said. "That's not why he killed them. He killed them because of his white
supremacist ideology."

Some media outlets used a more generalized "hate" narrative, which was part
of the story but not the whole story, he said.

The media seem to reserve the word "terrorist" for extremist Islamic
groups, Dixon said. That's odd, he said, given high-profile terrorist
attacks by anti-government white males in recent decades — the bombing in
Oklahoma City by anti-government militia member Timothy McVeigh and Terry
Nichols, which killed 168 people; and the 1996 Olympic bombing in Atlanta
by Eric Rudolph, who was convicted of other bombings at abortion clinics.

In their study, published online in the Journal of Communication, Dixon and
other researchers sampled 146 episodes of prominent news programs focused
on breaking news that aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and
Univision from 2008 to 2012.

They also found that, among those described as immigrants accused of a
crime on those news programs, almost all (97 percent) were identifiable as
Latinos. But only 47 percent of immigrants are Latinos, according to a 2013
report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the study said.

Among immigrants described on the news programs as undocumented, 99 percent
were identifiable as Latinos, according to the study — yet only 75 percent
of undocumented immigrants were Latinos, according to an often-cited 2005
report by the Pew Hispanic Center.

All told, the results show that "the entire way we conceive of these
policies is through a particular kind of ethnic lens," Dixon said in a UI
release. "Our conceptualization of various issues is so tied to race and
ethnicity considerations that we've actually been somewhat misinformed."

"We've had this overarching narrative now since 9-11, that our problems
with terrorists are about extremist Muslims. It's easier to keep that
frame," he added Monday.

The Charleston shooting discussion did turn quickly to issues of gun
control and whether South Carolina should remove the Confederate flag from
the state Capitol grounds, which makes sense, he said.

"There are multiple frames here. There are multiple layers of what this
tragedy means," he said.

The study also found that African-Americans were significantly
underrepresented in those stories, as both perpetrators and victims of
violent crime.


 In another surprising finding, the study found blacks were 19 percent of
the violent perpetrators in the news accounts, yet were 39 percent of those
arrested during that period, based on U.S. Department of Justice Uniform
Crime Reports. They were 22 percent of homicide victims in the news
accounts versus 48 percent in the national crime reports.

These results run contrary to previous research that has shown blacks as
overrepresented, especially as perpetrators, in TV crime coverage. But
they're in line with studies showing that African-Americans are rarely seen
on TV news as spokesmen, experts or in other roles, Dixon said.

One possible explanation, he said, is that the perceived threat from crime
has declined as a national issue since the 1990s. Crime rates have
declined, and the perceived threat from terrorism, surveillance and
immigration has increased, he said.

He advised viewers to be aware of their own biases and examine the source
of their media news for fairness and accuracy. But don't be afraid to look
at information that "you may disagree with. That's good," he said.

"Most people like to look at information that agrees with their own biases,
and hold onto their biases," he said. "That's not good for anybody, not
good for society."

About the study

— Travis Dixon conducted the research for the study while a professor at
UCLA. Trained student coders watched the programs and collected the data.

— Episodes included in the sample were from "ABC World News Tonight"; "CBS
Evening News"; "NBC Nightly News"; "PBS NewsHour"; "Anderson
Cooper/Anderson Cooper 360," "CNN Newsroom Live" and "The Situation Room"
on CNN; "Fox News Live" and "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren" on Fox
News; "MSNBC Live"; and "Univision Ultimate Hora" and "Noticero Univision"
on Univision.

— Additional research was done while Dixon was a visiting scholar at the
Center on Community Philanthropy at the University of Arkansas Clinton
School of Public Service. Dixon's co-author on the study is Professor
Charlotte Williams, director of the center.

===

Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898 x1
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