ABSTRACT
This chapter will concentrate on the Bradford riot of 7 July 2001 and in particular how this event was represented in the media. The riots resulted in property destruction, numerous arrests and a besmirched reputation for the city of Bradford in the north of England. On 11 September of the same year the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre occurred. Both events resulted in increasingly polarized and negative media representations of the Muslim population, not least in the United Kingdom (Spalek 2002, Abbas 2007). The riots gave rise to prejudiced media reporting, which have continued since then:
The media often equate Islam ‘with holy war and hatred, fanaticism and violence, intolerance and the oppression of women’ (Esposito, 1999:3). Stan Cohen (1972) suggests that moral panic is a media-orchestrated response of fear towards some group or individual ‘folk devil’, based on the perception that they are dangerously deviant and pose a menace to society. The new folk devil is the Muslim extremist, scapegoated for being criminally inclined and socially problematic because of failure to ‘integrate’.
