Muslims are overwhelmingly portrayed in a negative light in American and Western media, two political scientists have discovered through the analysis of hundreds of thousands of articles.

In a report published by the Associated Press’s (AP) outlet The Conversation, Erik Bleich and A. Maurits van der Veen, political scientists and professors at the universities of Middlebury and William & Mary, stated their findings that media outlets and organisations in the Western world, especially in the US, have been writing negatively about Muslims for at least over the past 26 years.

After downloading 256,963 articles mentioning Muslims or Islam – through popular media databases such as LexisNexis, Nexis Uni, ProQuest, and Factiva – while using the shorthand term “Muslim articles”, the two professors were able to develop a reliable method to measure the stories’ positivity or negativity by comparing them to a random sample of 48,283 other articles about different general topics.

What they found from the results of the almost 257,000 articles – which were sourced from 17 national, regional, and tabloid newspapers in the US from 1 January, 1996, to 31 December, 2016 – was that the average one mentioning Muslims or Islam in the US was more negative than 84 per cent of the articles from the random sample of other articles.

That meant, essentially, that for every one article portraying Muslims or Islam in a negative light in American newspapers, someone would have to read six articles on another topic to find even one piece that was as negative.

Source: Middle East Monitor