Exploring the Nature of Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Australian Press

Abstract

National press is considered as integral institution in articulation, propagation, and dissemination of the national agenda. The press helps general public in interpreting news stories. This article is set to explore the nature of representation of Islam and Muslims in the editorials of the Australian newspapers during January 01, 2016, to March 31, 2017. This study has employed van Dijk’s ideological square and lexicalization approaches within the critical discourse analysis paradigm to examine editorials from two leading Australian newspapers. The findings showed that both the newspapers The Age and The Australian produced entirely opposite discourses in their editorials regarding Islam and Muslims. The findings have demonstrated that The Age portrayed Islam and Muslims positively and favorably while The Australian constructed Islam and Muslims in a critical and negative way. In the editorial contents of The Age, predominant themes regarding Islam and Muslims were “victimization,” “understanding,” “multiculturalism,” “solidarity,” “cohesion,” and “harmony.” On the contrary, predominant discourse in the editorial contents of The Australian were “securitization,” “Othering,” “violence,” “categorization,” and “stereotyping.”

What Kind of Islamophobia? Representation of Muslims and Islam in Italian and Spanish Media

“…In particular, our findings corroborate that terrorism dominates the information on Islam and Muslims and, although the difference in Italy is minimal, they align with Ghauri and Umber's (2019) hypothesis that conservative media tend to depict Islam more negatively.…”

“…News outlets have been selected based on their readership, influence, and different political perspectives to obtain a more representative sample of political ideologies (Ghauri and Umber 2019;Cervi 2019). Accordingly, the online version of the two most read and influential conservative and left-leaning newspapers have been selected, respectively: conservative El Mundo and left-leaning El País for Spain and Il Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica for Italy.…”

Trump and Muslims: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Islamophobic Rhetoric in Donald Trump’s Selected Tweets

“…As a term, Islamophobia has different dimensions and directions, which first emerged in France around the 1920s (Allen, 2016). Considine (2017), Ghauri and Umber (2019), and Lyons (2014) argue that Islamophobia gained importance and use as a concept after the historical event of 9/11 in the United States. Ciftci (2012) argued that the rise of anti-Islam and anti-Muslims feelings and sentiments goes back to the 1980s, but the term Islamophobia was formally documented in January 2001 by the Stockholm International Forum on "Combating Intolerance."…”

“…Critical discourse analysis, also known as CDS, is a discipline to study a language from different aspects in both social and political matters (Flowerdew & Richardson, 2017;Ghauri & Umber, 2019;Mullet, 2018). Most recently, it has been postulated that CDS is an important tool aimed at critical-qualitative communication research (Khan et al, 2019;Reynolds, 2018).…”

“…In the same line, Ahmed and Matthes (2017) and Kazi (2017) argued that the way Muslims are being portrayed has become a stereotype since 9/11. Powell (2018), Khan et al (2019), and Ghauri and Umber (2019) claimed that 9/11 caused a rise in the production of Islamophobic discourse and it has been witnessing a constant growth where the media is the primary source of shaping peoples' ideology. This also resulted in a barrier on immigration from Islamic countries.…”