ABSTRACT
Despite journalists themselves being critical and conflicted about how Muslims are represented in British newspapers, negative and potentially harmful representations of Muslims continue to endure. To examine this contradiction, the chapter positions the relationship between journalists and their news institutions as a dialectic between agency and structure, drawing on British sociologist Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory. With his emphasis on the duality of the structure-agency relationship, Giddens argues that structures are both constitutive and constituted by agents. Through the structure-agency lens, it becomes possible to critique how established journalism practices contribute to the very inequalities they claim to redress. We can then consider normative indications of the cultural change needed to tackle the negative bias against Muslims in British newspapers. The structure-agency dichotomy is central to debates about journalistic autonomy and how journalists are able to shape their work against the structural constraints of the newspaper organisations they work for.
