Book Review: Mission Invisible: Race, Religion, and News at the Dawn of the 9/11 Era, by Ross Perigoe and Mahmoud Eid

Abstract

Mission Invisible: Race, Religion, and News at the Dawn of the 9/11 Era. Ross Perigoe and Mahmoud Eid. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: University of British Columbia Press, 2014. 332 pp. $99.00 hbk. $37.95 pbk.When Ross Perigoe began his doctorate at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, he had already spent decades in broadcasting for Canadian public radio and teaching journalism at Concordia University in Montreal. He was interested in the representation of minorities in Canadian news media, and this was to be the broad subject of his PhD. The case study-a discourse analysis of post-9/11 coverage in the (Montreal) Gazette- came to him the evening before meeting his thesis committee on, naturally, September 12, 2001.I am unclear when Mahmoud Eid, an associate professor in communications at the University of Ottawa, joined the project: Perigoe's final thesis was accepted in 2005, and he returned to Concordia. He died in 2012, before converting the work into a published monograph, and my guess is that Eid took on the role of midwife, seeing the book through to completion. Eid has focused his scholarly career on representations of Muslims and terrorism, so he was qualified for the job, but it is difficult not to think of Mission Invisible as Perigoe's project.What worked as a thesis does not necessarily translate into a successful monograph. 9/11 was still fresh during his studies, and the methodology-a mixture of qualitative and quantitative analysis of news texts-was only starting to surface in scholarly works on Muslims and the media. By 2014, however, more is demanded of a study on these matters, and Mission Invisible does not deliver the goods.Perigoe and Eid argue that in the weeks immediately following 9/11, the journalists of the Gazette failed to do their job, producing and reproducing racist rhetoric that was socially harmful. They sort their sample of news texts into three periods: Stunned in Grief (11-12 September), Justification for War (13-19 September), and Readying for War (20-30 September). The sources who contribute to these texts are likewise sorted into four categories, including leaders, white victims, Muslims, and journalists. The authors then analyze the rhetoric these sources used in describing Muslims in the news.This is a slender sample from which to spin a conclusive work. Montreal is a major North American city, but it was peripheral to the events of 9/11. They were nonetheless heavily reported in those first weeks. But the significant question for a study such as this is how the representations developed and what they have meant over time. This book is remarkably ahistorical, as the authors do not examine rhetoric in previous or subsequent crises nor the character of representation in quotidian coverage. They restrict their sample to the pointiest peak of a spike in coverage, reported in one newspaper for a city (within a nation) that was a bystander to the event. …