Media coverage of terrorism is biased against Muslims

A new report, produced by the Muslim Council of Britain, has found that mainstream media coverage of terrorism differs according to whom the perpetrator is, with terrorism more likely to be associated with Muslims and Islam than with far-right activists or white supremacists.

As Brenton Tarrant’s sentencing continues in New Zealand, the report, titled How The British Media Reports On Terrorism, claims that there is significant disparity in the association of ‘terror’ between so-called Muslim and non-Muslim perpetrators. It found that over half of the terms ‘terrorist’, ‘terrorism’ or ‘terror’ were used with the terms ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslim’ – almost nine times more than when the perpetrator was identified with the terms ‘far-right’, ‘neo-Nazi’ or ‘white supremacist’.

The Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring analysed over 230,000 articles published in 31 national online media outlets to show the inconsistencies in the coverage of terrorist attacks, depending on the background of the perpetrator.

In fact, during the period of October – December 2018, at least one in four online articles mentioning one or more identifiers of Muslims and/or Islam fell under the theme of terrorism or extremism.

Furthermore, whilst there were more than twice the number of referrals for ‘Islamist extremists’ than ‘far-right extremists’ to the government’s Counter-Terrorism Programme between 2017/2018, online media coverage disproportionately referred to ‘Islamist’ terror six times more frequently.

The report did find that significant improvements have been made in the past year, with greater recognition of white supremacist terror, mainly as a result of major attacks in Christchurch and El Paso.