Media Portrayals of Minorities: Muslims in British Newspaper Headlines, 2001–2012

Abstract

To better understand the public portrayal of minorities, we propose a new and systematic procedure for measuring the standing of different groups that relies on the tone of daily newspaper headlines containing the names of minority groups. This paper assesses the portrayal of Muslims in the British print media between 2001 and 2012, focusing especially on testing scholarly propositions that Muslims are depicted in a systematically negative way. We compare the tone of newspaper headlines across time and across newspaper type and compare the portrayal of Muslims to that of Jews and Christians. We do not find support for arguments that Muslims are consistently portrayed in a negative manner in the British media as a whole. However, our data demonstrate that headlines in right-leaning newspapers are more negative than those in left-leaning newspapers, and that Muslims are consistently portrayed more negatively than Jews and frequently more negatively than Christians. These findings thus offer a more nuanced understanding of British newspaper portrayals of Muslims than exists in the contemporary scholarly literature.