Media and Religion

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31 Media and Religion Leen d’Haenens and Jan Bosman

Chapter overview In general, the media tend to ignore religion unless it becomes problematic and/or religious individuals/groups behave in a disruptive fashion. Focusing on the portrayal of Islam in six Dutch newspapers as a case study, this chapter outlines some of the major ways in which the mainstream media play a visible role in constructing and reproducing multiple images of Islam. Fluctuations in the coverage are clearly event-driven, as most of the attention goes to events that have taken place in the Netherlands. Comparing the reporting of two crises, one international (9/11) and one national (the murder of Theo van Gogh), Dutch journalists appear cautious about running the risk of holding the Muslim community at large responsible for the acts of a few terrorists when dealing with the 9/11 attacks, however the opposite tendency was observed when dealing with the Van Gogh murder. Here journalists were significantly more negative about Muslims and more positive about non-Muslims in the period after the murder; the balance was restored afterwards. As to the use of framing, the framing pattern is about the same for both events. However, after the Amsterdam murder, the amount of framing drops dramatically. Assuming – as it is argued here – that bias is associated with the use of news frames, then we can conclude that Dutch journalists considered it risky to utter harsh criticism of Islam, like Theo van Gogh himself used to do.

Now that religious diversity is with us, can multicultural societies accommodate it? The global prominence of religion in the public sphere and in the political agenda, the central position of religious diversity in debates about immigration and the stiffening of integration policies, all cast serious doubts on the thesis that religion is becoming less important in our society (Davie 2007; Stout and Buddenbaum 1996). The importance of the religious dimension in shaping ethnic cultural identities reveals a reality that has now become undeniable and that the German

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Part 5 Media Representations

philosopher Jürgen Habermas (2001) has called the ‘post-secular society’ (Koenig 2005). The media are turning the spotlight on the crucial question of how to achieve a viable co-existence of diverse religions in a contemporary understanding of democracy, a question exemplified in debates about freedom of expression and about dress codes. But they also tend to turn their attention to religion in so far as it is problematic and insofar as religious groups or individuals behave disruptively (e.g. Bramadat 2005): take, for instance, the coverage of the numerous cases of members of the clergy accused, falsely or not, of having practiced paedophilia (the so-called ‘vicars and knickers’ news stories). The case study we have chosen in the problem-oriented relationship between media and religion is the portrayal of Islam and Muslims in the Dutch mainstream press. The Netherlands, often praised for its tolerance towards ‘otherness’, has long being characterised by the so-called ‘pillarised’ or segmented community model, i.e. a model of society consisting of separate social groups, each with its own institutions, based upon homogeneous religious beliefs and ideologies. As of the 1960s, with the declining role of the church, de-segmentation began with the individual assuming a much more prominent role. In view of the growing importance of about one million Muslims in the Netherlands (a country with some 16.4 million inhabitants), with Turks (328,000) and Moroccans (296,000) representing the largest ethnic minorities (CBS Statline 2007), a possible development – which goes against the general tendency towards de-segmentation that has affected Dutch society – could be the creation, at some point, of an Islamic pillar with its own daily press, political parties, clinics, etc. In reality, the formation of Muslim institutions within Dutch society has been sporadic and very much dependent on the integration strategies adopted (e.g. a multicultural, as against an assimilationist, perspective) at the national and regional levels, and the degree of empathy shown towards Muslims (Rath 2005). In all, Muslims constitute an important group in the religious spectrum of the Netherlands. How the Muslim minority is going to develop in the future – whether it is going to form a new pillar or whether it will integrate in Dutch society – is at least partly dependent on the coverage Islam will receive in the media.

The Dutch and Muslims: mutual sentiments and resentment In two different months of 2004, June and December – i.e. before and after the ritual murder of the controversial movie-maker Theo van Gogh by fundamentalist Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri – the pollster TNS NIPO investigated how native Dutch people felt about ethnic minorities and Muslims in the Netherlands. The study revealed that between June and December 2004 native Dutch people became more anxious about the possibility of terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists. In June half of respondents said to be afraid of terrorism, however in December this had gone up to two thirds. After the murder of Theo van Gogh in December 2004 one fifth of the population felt threatened by Muslims, as against one sixth in June. Rath (2005: 32) sums up the situation as follows: ‘The terrorist

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Chapter 31 Media and Religion

actions in various places in the world, the war against terror, the slaying of the maverick movie-maker Theo van Gogh and so forth have nourished the distrust of Muslims and furthered governmental interference in the lives of Muslims.’ Political actors on both sides of the political divide made the perception of a ‘Muslim threat’ even worse. For instance, the right-wing populist politician Pim Fortuyn called Islam a backward culture, while several imams made the news with controversial pronouncements and acts. Examples are imam El Moumni, who called homosexuality a disease, and the imam of Tilburg, Ahmed Salam, who refused to shake hands with Rita Verdonk, the then Minister of Integration, because she is a woman. The criticism of Islam voiced by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of parliament for the Liberal Party (VVD), stirred up passions even more. More recently, the denunciation of Islam by the right-wing populist Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, had made the party a popular political player (it gained nine seats in the 2006 elections for the Second Chamber). In short, from the 1980s onward various events and/or statements made by prominent people may have contributed to straining the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Netherlands. The media also play a role in shaping the image of ethnic minorities, and this role will be the topic of the present chapter. Just consider the publication of the 12 Mohammed cartoons in the Danish national newspaper Jyllands Posten in September 2005. The cartoons were reprinted by some European print media outlets in early 2006: what in the West was seen as a basic freedom (i.e. freedom of expression), was considered highly offensive in the Arab and Islamic world. (For an analysis of the Mohammed cartoons controversy in the media discourse of several countries see Kunelius et al. 2007.)

Media: a dark mirror of reality? Mainstream media texts are important since they provide the main source of knowledge about a large number of issues; in informing us, the media contribute to our ‘commonsense’ understanding of the world. As such, media texts are believed to affect the way in which we understand ourselves and others. This chapter proceeds on the basis of the assumption that the media at least partially construct the social fabric of peoples’ lives, especially when issues are unfamiliar and far removed from people’s daily experiences; it is in these cases that the media function as substitutes for these real life experiences. Ethnic minorities argue that the Dutch media provide a one-sided and often negative portrayal of ethnicminority groups. The image thus created is said to be an unfair reflection of the multicultural society of the Netherlands and is one of the reasons why ethnic minorities do not sufficiently recognise themselves in the media (d’Haenens et al. 2004: 49). As much as 63 per cent of the Muslim population in the Netherlands judges the coverage of Muslims in the Dutch mainstream media to be negative. 73 per cent of respondents believe the turning point to have been the 9/11 attacks, while 18 per cent mention the assassination of Theo van Gogh on 2 November 2004 (TNS NIPO 2005).

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The criticism leveled by Dutch Muslims at the mainstream media is backed up empirically by a longitudinal content analysis (covering the period 1998–2004) (d’Haenens and Bink 2006) of the coverage of Islam and Muslim-related news in the popular daily Algemeen Dagblad. The analysis reveals that often news articles showed a negative slant in that they focused on terrorism, religious fundamentalism and violence. One possible explanation for this is that news is, by definition, bad news and that journalists always tend to be on the look-out for alarming and revealing news items. Good news, corrective information and data which put things in perspective are often included in later editions of a story and are given less prominence. Strikingly, however, the tone adopted in news items with an ethnic character (whether religious or not) is often more critical than in items with a non-ethnic character (Ter Wal et al. 2005: 947). The media often portray Muslims as fanatics, as irrational, primitive, militant and dangerous people (Shadid and Van Koningsveld 2002: 174). The most often cited shortcomings of the coverage of Islam are the following: the portrayal of Islam is too simplistic and too unsympathetic; Muslim groups are presented as the source of intractable problems and are often stigmatised; society is split into the categories of us and them; Muslims are not given an opportunity to voice their own opinions. According to Shadid and Van Koningsveld (2002: 175) the media have, since the mid-1980s, constantly and wrongfully pointed the finger at the menace allegedly posed by the Muslim world. Research carried out in Great Britain by Elizabeth Poole (2002) shows that a mere 12 per cent of news concerning Islam deals with British Muslims, as the British press is very much focused on international news items and takes a great interest in so-called ‘global Islam’. Poole also argues that British Muslims are looked at in the light of acts committed by Muslims in, for example, the Middle East (i.e. they are ‘guilt by association’). Richardson (2004), too, writes about the negative portrayal of Muslims in the media in his book about the representation of Islam in British newspapers. He points out that positive actions by Muslims are not attributed to or explained by their being Muslims, while negative actions are. First, a division is produced between us and them and subsequently a negative image of Muslims is created. The outcome is that we and they soon translated into we against them or we over them (Richardson 2004). The articles Richardson analysed also showed, in several different ways, what kind of threat Muslims allegedly posed: whether it was a military threat posed by Muslim countries against others, the terrorist and/or extremist threat, the threat against democracy that Islam allegedly posed in the Middle-east, or the threat to Muslim as well as nonMuslim women. Generally speaking, the news coverage in the seven British papers studied can be labelled as ‘Islamophobic’. The picture that British newspapers sketch of Muslims is that of a homogeneous, separate, inferior and hostile group (Richardson 2004: 232). The study by d’Haenens and Bink (2006) showed that the distinction between news coverage of domestic, as against foreign, Islam is not unimportant. News items about Islam in the Netherlands give space to several people, among whom are Dutch Muslims and Islam scholars. As a result, news about Dutch Islam can be said to be much more accurate and to reflect more shades of meaning. By contrast, news about Islam abroad is more often inaccurate, imbalanced and over-simplified, and stigmatisation and polarisation are found more often. Nonetheless, according to

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d’Haenens and Bink (2006), the assassination of Theo van Gogh on 2 November 2004 triggered several changes in the coverage of Islam: interest in Islam increased in the Netherlands, more non-Muslims were quoted in articles on Islam than before, these articles tended to become longer and journalists began to take a more negative approach towards Muslims, and to deal in a more positive fashion with non-Muslims. The overall result of this was increased polarisation. It is fair, then, to say – even without conducting an exhaustive overview of research in this particular field – that a good number of studies lend empirical support to the criticism leveled at news coverage about Muslims and/or ethnic minorities. Internet discussion forums prove to be an adequate outlet to express frustration with the mainstream media: it is the place where members of ethnic minorities can talk of issues which the Dutch media do not, or hardly, touch upon. A few small-scale case-studies (Brouwer 2002; Geense and Pels 2002) illustrate the diversity of the topics discussed in internet forums as well as the omnipresence of religious topics. Brouwer calls the internet a ‘digital minaret’. At the end of 1998, a group of Moroccan students launched www.maroc.nl out of sheer dissatisfaction with the news coverage provided by the Dutch media (due to lack of recognition) and because it gave them the opportunity of chatting with each other in Dutch. Their intention was to set up and develop Maroc.nl as an uncensored digital platform in order to further the spread of information, communication and integration of ethnic minorities in Dutch society (see d’Haenens and Van Summeren 2006; Van Summeren 2007). Nevertheless, in this chapter we focus on coverage of Islam in the mainstream media.

Research questions The above-mentioned study by d’Haenens and Bink into one popular Dutch daily served as the starting-point for a more exhaustive analysis of news about Islam and Muslims. First, we address the question of how Islam is covered in a broader range of Dutch newspapers. To that end, we will analyse articles about Islam and Muslims in the six most important national newspapers (Het Parool, Trouw, De Telegraaf, De Volkskrant, NRC Handelsblad and Algemeen Dagblad) in the year 2005. Questions related to this issue are: how often is news about Islam included? Are there any differences in the number of news items from one month to the next? Can these differences be explained on the basis of the events themselves? What are Muslims given a say on or mentioned for, and who speaks on behalf of the Islamic community? Are these persons mentioned by name, paraphrased or quoted? These questions will be answered in the cross-sectional part of our investigation. Second, we examine the degree to which the news about Islam-related issues changes in times of crisis. To this end we will analyse the coverage of Islam and Muslims in the Algemeen Dagblad from 2000 to 2005, a period that includes the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the murder of Theo van Gogh on 2 November 2004. We will investigate whether the attitude towards Islam and Muslims changes due to these events and whether the ways in which Islam and Muslims are framed changes. We address these topics in the longitudinal part of our study.

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News frames Before considering the news coverage in more detail, we need to turn briefly to the concept of ‘news frames’. Framing means that news is covered in a particular fashion, so that problems, causes and solutions are advanced and moral judgments are suggested (Entman 1993). Similar to what happens in the gate-keeping process, some events and aspects of a problem are presented, while others are not. Generally speaking, frames are defined as ways to ensure that a specific interpretation of a text is made more likely: ‘To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communication text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation’ (Entman 1993: 52). More recently, Entman suggested that bias is the organising concept behind framing (and agenda setting), defining bias as ‘consistent patterns in the framing of mediated communication’ (2007: 166). Hence, frames present topics from a particular perspective by emphasising certain aspects or, conversely, by omitting them. It is thanks to the frames that journalists, as well as the receivers of media messages, can grasp a news story, interpret it and give it a meaning. Frames are structured through the presence or absence of given key words, expressions, stereotype images, sources of information and sentences which all serve to back up a given opinion or judgment (Entman 1993). Frames help the media user to form an opinion and to arrive at conclusions about a given issue. This is different, therefore, from the concept of agenda setting, in which the media do not determine the user’s attitude towards a given topic. By contrast, the concept of framing suggests that the media are actually able, by means of news frames, to determine how a topic should be interpreted. Whether they are successful in this, is yet another question, one which has so far not received an unambiguous answer. Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) suggest that reporters usually resort to five frames. The first of these is the conflict frame, which emphasises conflict between individuals, groups and parties. Research shows that complicated public issues are usually reduced to a simple conflict between political parties. One outcome of this particular way of framing a conflict may be that the media thus tend to cultivate cynicism on the part of the public at large and add to people’s lack of confidence in politics. The second frame is the human interest frame, which presents events, topics or issues from a human and emotional perspective. The news is personalised, dramatised and emotionalised in an attempt to draw the public’s attention and keep it going. Next there is the economic effects frame, which focuses on the economic effects that an event, an issue or a topic could have on individuals, groups, institutions, countries or regions. In the fourth frame, the morality frame, religious principles and moral rules in their relation with events, issues and topics take a central position. News items are looked at from a religious or moral point of view. Since journalists are under the obligation to be objective, they often indirectly refer to moral rules by giving the floor to others and by letting others voice criticism. They can, for instance, quote a party involved and let him or her question the truth or value of the event or issue concerned. Finally, the responsibility frame emphasises the question of the responsibility or even the guilt of political

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authorities or individuals. Media tend to be able to convince the public of a given party’s responsibility for causing or solving social problems.

Islam in the Dutch newspapers: a cross-sectional study All articles published in the six above-mentioned newspapers in 2005 and dealing with Islam as the key theme were analysed.1 The newspapers concerned are three national quality papers (De Volkskrant, NRC Handelsblad, Trouw), two national popular papers (Algemeen Dagblad, De Telegraaf) and the quality paper Het Parool, which used to be a national newspaper but which now focuses on Amsterdam and its region. In the search engine Lexis Nexis the terms Islam, Muslim(s) and fundamentalism were entered, specifying that articles with at least one of these terms in the headline or opening paragraph were to be listed. The term Islam in the headline yielded 208 articles, and in the opening paragraph 867 articles; Muslim(s) in the title yielded 405 items, in the opening paragraph 53; fundamentalism in the headline yielded 13 articles, in the opening paragraph 53. This procedure gave us the bulk of the news items in which Islam was the key topic. All the articles occurring twice as well as those in which Islam eventually turned out not to be the key topic were removed. In all 1130 articles were analysed.

General features Figure 31.1 shows the greater interest in Islam and Muslims in the first three months of 2005, as opposed to 2004, which can be explained by the aftermath of the murder of Theo van Gogh on 2 November 2004. The terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists in London on 7 July 2005 resulted in a renewed focus on Islam. The third upsurge in concern with Islam came in November 2005, on the first anniversary of the murder of Van Gogh. Clearly, the coverage is to a large extent event-driven. The highest number of the events reported in the press took place in the Netherlands (28 per cent), especially in Amsterdam (12 per cent) or Rotterdam (8 per cent), and in the Middle East (6 per cent). Most of the texts (61 per cent) are relatively long (400 words or more), which suggests that there is more room for different opinions. As a matter of fact, this is what happens in the texts under study: in 11 per cent of the short articles (with a maximum of 150 words) one or more Muslims are quoted; in medium-long texts (151–400 words) that percentage rises to 28 per cent; finally, it rises to nearly 48 per cent in long articles. A similar pattern is found with regard to non-Muslims. Domestic issues having to do with Islam in the Netherlands are the topic of a large number of articles (38 per cent); non-region-related articles and fairly general considerations about Islam take second place (27 per cent), while coverage of Islam in other countries ranks third (25 per cent). The most frequent topics are religion

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Part 5 Media Representations 160

Number of articles published

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Figure 31.1 Articles on Islam and Muslims in the Dutch press in 2005 (N = 1,130)

and religious practices (27 per cent), politics (15 per cent), terrorism (13 per cent), ethnic relations (10 per cent) and criminality and violence (7 per cent). What is striking, though, is that more than one fourth (28 per cent) of the items with a religious dimension deals with fundamentalism. One article in eight (12 per cent) with a religious dimension discusses the rules laid down in the Koran. Other prominent topics are personal religious practices (8 per cent), the spread of Islam (7 per cent) and issues involving mosques (6 per cent). A large number of texts (25 per cent) treats the question of how Muslims can practice their religion in Dutch society, comparing the choices made by traditional orthodox Muslims, who strictly adhere to the rules of the Koran, with those made by modern, more liberal Muslims, who advocate a freer interpretation of Islam.

Muslim actors, relations and points of view The 1130 articles present 2998 Muslim actors – the term ‘actor’ including individuals as well as organisations. The analysis focused on how many Muslim actors were mentioned, quoted or paraphrased in each article. Most Muslim actors (66 per cent) were merely mentioned; 23 per cent were quoted and 12 per cent paraphrased. The large percentage of actors who were merely mentioned can probably be explained by the fact that it is more practical and cheaper to mention actors rather than interviewing them. In 43 per cent of cases the actor involved mainly speaks for him or herself, i.e. he or she is not presented as an expert, nor as a spokesperson for a Muslim organisation, nor a person with a special role. By contrast, 14 per cent of the actors represent an Islamic organisation or institution, and 11 per cent speak for an underground movement (e.g. a terrorist organisation);

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in the latter case, Al-Quaeda and the Dutch Hofstad group are the most frequently mentioned groups. Entrepreneurs are underrepresented in the articles, as economic affairs and trade are the key topics in a mere 2 per cent of the texts. Muslim actors stem from all regions of the societal spectrum, and are very diverse overall: 54 per cent of the Muslim actors who are quoted speak as citizens, 47 per cent as experts, i.e. as members of a certain organisation, a political party, the authorities or the police. Considering Muslim actors as individuals, we found that 78 per cent were men and only 22 per cent women. Men (80 per cent) were mentioned four times more often than women (20 per cent) and were quoted three times more often than women (76 per cent vs. 24 per cent).

Comparing the newspapers We find significant differences between the six papers with regard to the number of news items included that focus on Islam and Muslims. The three quality papers together published three fourths of the overall annual number of Islamrelated news items. Trouw, for instance, had five times more articles than the popular De Telegraaf. A further striking finding is that reporting on Islam had far greater highs and lows in the popular papers than the quality press. The quality papers also showed fluctuations in their interest, however these ups and downs were much less substantial than those of the popular press. Another difference is that the popular papers carried significantly more short news items with factual information, whereas the quality papers had longer items that included contextual information, and significantly more interviews, opinions and letters to the editor.

Islam in Dutch newspapers: a longitudinal study As mentioned before, the media mainly tend to deal with religion when this is seen as a problem or when the behaviour of religious groups or individuals gives cause for alarm. This is especially true of reporting about Islam in Western countries. According to Abrahamian (2003) the news coverage about 9/11 in American newspapers was mainly framed in religious terms. At least partly inspired by Huntington’s controversial article, ‘The clash of civilizations?’ (1993), the media have cast the 9/11 events as a battle between Islam and Western civilisation. In the following we will focus on the question of the extent to which the coverage of Islam-related news is affected by acts committed by individual Muslims. To this end, an analysis is made of Islam-related news at and around two points in time where individual Muslims received negative attention, i.e. 11 September 2001, the day when Muhammad Atta and his accomplices crashed their planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and 2 November 2004, the day when Theo van Gogh was killed by Mohammed Bouyeri.

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0,60 Muslims

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Figure 31.2 Attitude towards Muslims and non-Muslims in the reporting as a reaction to the events of 11 September 2001 and 2 November 2004

Figure 31.2 shows the attitude towards Muslims and non-Muslims in the reporting of the Algemeen Dagblad (AD) from 2000 to 2005. This span of five years is subdivided into five periods: 1. before 9/11 (20 months); 2. the month immediately following 9/11; 3. between a month after 9/11 and the murder of Theo van Gogh on 2 November 2004 (approximately 34 months); 4. the month immediately following the murder, and finally 5. the period beginning a month after the murder until the end of 2005 (approximately 13 months). In the period before 9/11, reporting was slightly (but significantly) more positive about non-Muslims. Surprisingly, in the month after 9/11 the Islam-related articles became significantly more positive about Muslims and significantly more negative about non-Muslims. Apparently, journalists were cautious about running the risk of holding the Muslim community at large responsible for the acts of a few terrorists. In an attempt to balance the slant of their texts, they overshot their mark adopting some kind of self-censorship and ending up providing a positive coverage of Muslims. In the third period, the long intervening period before the murder of Theo van Gogh, the balance was restored. We found that the reporting of the murder of Theo van Gogh followed the opposite trajectory. Right after 2 November 2004, Islam-related articles were significantly more negative about Muslims and significantly more positive about non-Muslims. In the final period the normal balance was again almost restored, however the tendency to cover non-Muslims more positively has all but disappeared.

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It is worth giving some thought to the question of why the reaction to 9/11 in the Dutch newspapers was so different from that of the American press (Abrahamian 2003) and also to why the Dutch press treated 9/11 and the murder of Theo van Gogh so differently. The contrast may be due to the fact that the attack of 9/11 was close to home for the US media, and, conversely, that the murder of Theo van Gogh affected Dutch people more profoundly than the 9/11 events as it took place on Dutch soil. However, it is also possible that the two events do not stand isolated and should be interpreted in the context of a longer series of incidents involving Muslim extremists, such as the attacks in Madrid and the London bombings. From that perspective, the attacks of 9/11 and the murder of Theo van Gogh would become just two incidents in a longer series of negative events as a result of which tolerance of Islam and Muslims could be said to be gradually waning. Figure 31.3 presents the degree of framing with which the crises of 11 September 2001 and 2 November 2004, as well as the periods before and after these two dates, were covered in the Algemeen Dagblad. Obviously, the amount of framing is event-driven. There is less framing in terms of economics and more framing in terms of conflict and morality, and in the case of 2 November also more framing in terms of human interest. The pattern is about the same for 9/11 and 11/2. However, after the murder of Theo van Gogh the amount of framing drops dramatically, so much so that framing is almost absent. In all, the amount of framing of Islam is clearly sensitive to the disrupting events of 11 September and 2 November. And if bias is expressed as patterns in the amount of framing, then the almost total absence of framing seems to imply that journalists have interpreted the murder of Theo van Gogh as evidence that it is risky to express unrefined opinions

1.00 Conflict Human interest Responsibility Morality Economy

Degree of framing

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Figure 31.3 Framing of Islam as a reaction to the events of 11 September 2001 and 2 November 2004

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about Islam, like Theo van Gogh used to do. This is in line with our previous finding that the relatively more positive attitude in writing about non-Muslims has almost disappeared in the last period.

Discussion Having reflected on the representation of religion in the media, what emerges from the analysis of the press coverage and the degree of framing adopted is that the mainstream media seem to have very little counterweight to offer against black and white-thinking. Fluctuations in the coverage of Islam were clearly driven by events, most of the attention going to events that took place in the Netherlands. By taking a biased look and by insisting on, for instance, interethnic conflict and religious fundamentalism, the mainstream media may even end up supporting and fostering polarising tendencies in society. The analysis also reveals that, as a response to disruptive events, the characteristics attributed to Muslim actors in news stories as part of routine reporting may shift in times of crisis. Comparing the reporting of two crises, one international (9/11) and one national (the murder of Theo van Gogh), Dutch journalists were found to be cautious about giving the impression to be holding responsible the Muslim community at large for the acts of a few terrorists when dealing with the 9/11 attacks. However, the opposite tendency emerged when dealing with the murder of Van Gogh, as journalists were significantly more negative about Muslims and more positive about non-Muslims following this event. As for the use of framing, the framing pattern was about the same for both events (i.e. more conflict and more morality framing). However, after the Amsterdam murder, the amount of framing dropped dramatically. Assuming that bias is associated with the use of news frames, this implies that Dutch journalists considered it risky to express unrefined opinions about Islam, like Theo van Gogh himself used to do. As a complement to the changing stances and loyalties of the mainstream media, in light of the events covered, the Internet is usually regarded as an interactive medium with a great potential for attracting an ethnic-minority public, which can thus broaden its horizon and obtain information framed from a different perspective (d’Haenens et al., 2000). Maroc.nl is just one of the big web communities of Moroccans in the Netherlands illustrating that new media technologies can function as a bonding spot for ‘soul mates’ or a possibility to connect across space with other Muslims, which enables them to engage in a virtual Islamic public sphere and to particularly challenge the biased portrayal of Islam which is found in the mainstream media.

Questions 1 Select a week’s routine coverage in your local or regional newspaper and compare the portrayal of Muslims and non-Muslim actors in Islam-related articles with that of a national newspaper. Do you find any differences? If so, what differences? Try to formulate

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your answer by considering article length, local/regional versus national events, national versus international events. Can you identify the use of particular news frames in both newspapers? Is there any difference in the amount of framing and the kinds of frames being used?

2 Consider a crisis in which religion has played a major role (e.g. protests against the building of a mosque, Muslim women claiming the right to wear the veil at work, etc.) in your region/country and look at the coverage of it in your local or regional newspaper. Compare the portrayal of Muslims with non-Muslim. Who is being paraphrased or quoted most of the time? What is the attitude of the journalist towards Muslim and non-Muslim sources that are brought up in the article (i.e. positive, negative, mixed, unclear)?

3 Media have a choice when portraying their complex relationship with religion. On the one hand, they can promote inter-religious exchange and mutual tolerance. On the other, they can increase conflict by providing biased coverage of religious issues. Select at least 10 different articles in which a religion is featured prominently. Do not limit yourself to Islam, but look at other religions, too (such as Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, etc.). Look at those who are seen as the representatives of such religions (e.g. the pope, priests, bishops, imams, muftis, etc.) and look at the ways in which these actors are described (e.g., conservative, liberal, aggressive, exotic, mystic, caring, etc.). Can you discover similarities in the ways these different religions are represented or do you see mostly differences? Can you identify recurrent patterns when a given religion is talked about?

Note 1 The groundwork for this research was carried out by Jop van Steen, who graduated in 2007 with a Master’s thesis in communication science entitled ‘I’m a Muslim. Don’t panic!’

Further reading d’Haenens, L. (2003) ‘ICT in Multicultural Society. The Netherlands: A Context for Sound Multiform Media Policy?’ Gazette. The International Journal for Communication Studies 65 (4–5): 401–21. Discusses the Netherlands as a multicultural society as well as its media and diversity policies. Bosman, J. and d’Haenens, L. (2008) ‘News Reporting on Pim Fortuyn. Framing in Two Dutch Newspapers’ Media, Culture & Society 30 (5): 735–48. Adopts framing analysis on the reporting of the murder of Pim Fortuyn, comparing a popular and an elite newspaper.

References Abrahamian, E. (2003) ‘The US media, Huntington and September 11’, Third World Quarterly, 24 (3): 529–44. Bramadat, P. (2005) ‘Re-visioning Religion in the Contemporary Period. The United Church of Canada’s Ethnic Ministries Unit’, Canadian Diversity/Diversité canadienne, 4 (3): 59–62. Brouwer, L. (2002) ‘Marokkaanse jongeren en virtuele discussies’, Sociologische Gids 49, (2): 121–33.

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