ABSTRACT
Why have Muslims become the exceptional target for the British press? Research on Muslim representation in the Western media reports the dominant, shared tendency to negatively frame Muslims and to depict Islam as a violent and uncivilised religion. The chapter draws on the experiences of journalists and editors to investigate how they frame news stories about Muslims, including their choice of language, sources and news angles. It demonstrates that negative representations of Muslims are often reproduced through journalists’ own common-sense understandings of what Muslims ‘are’. In particular, news stories draw on language and imagery that present Muslims as the problematic ‘Other’ by privileging certain interpretations of Muslims while marginalising others. Rather than reflecting a direct and overt anti-Muslim bias, journalists’ accounts also show negative representations to be problematic and unacceptable in a liberal and multicultural British society. This reflects the contradictory nature of negative representations as driven by the concurrent need to accommodate Muslims as part of British society while also rejecting them.
