Abstract
The conceptions sources have of journalists influence whether and in what ways those sources engage with the news media. In this paper, I consider the contribution of Muslim sources to news in a context of perceived negativity. Scholarship on the content of British news stories about Muslims has found a consistently negative tone; my study examines the impressions of sources as co-producers of that content. My data come from qualitative fieldwork conducted in Glasgow, Scotland, studying relationships between journalists and Muslim sources through a combination of methods, with an emphasis on interviews. In these interviews, sources articulated an overwhelmingly negative conception of journalists and news organisations. I consider different constructions of negativity and what they suggest about how participants perceive the media, and I problematise the minority instances of positive conceptions. Finally, I evaluate why sources who identify as Muslim would bother participating in media production, given this perception of negativity. This discussion is informed by Couldry’s concept of ‘media meta-capital’ (Couldry 2003), which a macro-level power that imposes other fields of public life, and Schlesinger’s attentiveness to source strategies (Schlesinger 1990), a form of agency at the micro-level. This case study suggests that, whatever sources think of media coverage, their choice to contribute to its production is conditioned by strategic considerations, revealing development in the media’s relations with Muslims in Britain.
Highlights
The conceptions sources have of journalists influence whether and in what ways those sources engage with the news media
Osama Saeed2 – once an activist in Glasgow, Scotland and, at the time of our interview, the media relations head of Al Jazeera in Doha – identified this distorted portrait: ‘[U]ltimately, the Muslim community – and I’m going to make a monolithical, grand, sweeping statement, here – they have a very [...] monolithic view of media, in the same way that sometimes the media have a monolithic view of Muslims, which is that the media are all bad, and they are all out to get us.’
As the quotation shows, Saeed was aware of the essentialising nature of his comment even as he offered it, and he strategically connected it to the prevailing view of how Muslims appear in the media, so that misrepresentations are made by both parties in both directions
Summary
The conceptions sources have of journalists influence whether and in what ways those sources engage with the news media. Islam is a newsworthy story for the British media, and what Muslim sources think of journalists, journalism, and news coverage matters.
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