ABSTRACT
The chapter investigates how journalists’ preconceptions about audiences and their expectations influence their reporting on Muslims. This includes how commercial pressures, including the need to compete with social media, often lead to the privileging of negative representations that generate fear and anxiety. A closer examination of journalists’ ambivalent conceptualisation of ‘audiences’ suggests that negative representations of Muslims become justified according to the desires and demands of an imaginary, more ideological construction of the ‘public, particularly in the age of social media and audience metrics. Much of the insights in this chapter come from the contradictions that arose across journalists’ accounts between deeply held ideas of what journalism should be in relation to audiences and how audiences are conceptualised in practice when it came to stories involving Muslims. The responsibilities of journalists to audiences as citizens (rather than as consumers) also opened up spaces for alternative ways of framing stories about Muslims with wider public interest in mind.
