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Islam in the Media 2017 1 OnePath Network | Islam in the Media 2017 1 2017 A YEAR IN REVIEW: ISLAM IN THE MEDIA ONEPATHNETWORK.COM 2 OnePath Network | Islam in the Media 2017 OnePath Network is Australia’s first and largest Islamic original content video production studio and media outlet. Based in Sydney, Australia, it was established in February 2014 as a not-for-profit organisation. With rising Islamophobia and misconceptions about Islam, a small group of young Muslims decided it was time that the Australian Muslim community was given a voice. Our network has now grown to reach across the globe, with content being viewed hundreds of millions of times, and winning local and international awards. COPYRIGHT © BY ONEPATH NETWORK, 2018 OnePath Network | Islam in the Media 2017 3 Contents Executive Summary ..................................................................................................... 4 The Most Overblown Events of the Year ......................................................8 The War on Terror ...........................................................................................................................................10 Yassmin Abdel-Magied ................................................................................................................................11 Punchbowl Boys High School ................................................................................................................. 12 Flinders St. Tragedy ....................................................................................................................................... 13 Same Sex Jihad ................................................................................................................................................ 13 Why our Standards for Journalists Are Too Low ..................................14 Is our Fear of Islam Rational? ..............................................................................16 Moving Forward ........................................................................................................... 20 Appendices ......................................................................................................................22 4 OnePath Network | Islam in the Media 2017 THE RESULTS OF OUR YEAR LONG ANALYSIS OF ISLAM IN THE MEDIA OnePath Network | Islam in the Media 2017 5 For the entire year of 2017, OnePath Network tracked how 5 of Australia’s biggest newspapers reported on Islam. We wanted to see exactly how the media portrayed the 2.6% of the Australian population that identify as Muslim, and whether or not journalists and columnists were fair in Around 604,000 their coverage. Australians, or around 2.6% of To do this, we used the ProQuest Australia and New the population, Identify as Zealand Newsstream database, which converts the Muslim. daily newspapers of all major publications in the region into searchable text. Focusing on 5 newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch’s company News Ltd., namely The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun, The Courier Mail and The Advertiser, we used boolean operators to find all articles that referred to Islam or Muslims alongside words like violence, extreme, terror or radical (all terms included variations, i.e. islamIST, terrorISM etc.) This is what we found. 6 OnePath Network | Islam in the Media 2017 Whilst it isn’t exactly news that newspapers like The Daily Telegraph and The Australian talk about Islam a lot, what is really shocking is just how much they do it. We found almost 3000 articles that referred to Islam or Muslims alongside words like violence, extremism, terrorism or radical 2891 That’s over 8 articles a day in the Murdoch press slamming Muslims. If all of those were put together, that would be a full Negative Articles double-page spread. Every single day. Written About Islam We also found 152 front pages over the year that featured Islam in some negative capacity. A lot of the time, these articles and exclusives were the featured item, the most important story for selling the newspaper. When we looked more closely, we saw that certain names came up time and time again, as they have been for almost 2 decades. We analysed 6 of the most controversial commentators in The 152 Australian news media, including figures like Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine and Janet Albrechtsen. On average, 31% of their opinion Front-Pages pieces were devoted to Islam, with the overwhelming majority of About Islam them being negative and divisive in nature. For Jennifer Oriel, that number was 54%. Even though they are opinions, pieces such as these encourage and promote ideals that could be threatening to a minority community. In every statistic we found, from negative articles to front-page features to audience write-ins, we came to the same conclusion: the way the media talks about Islam in Australia is disproportionate, divisive and dangerous. OnePath Network | Islam in the Media 2017 7 # OF NEGATIVE ARTICLES WRITTEN EVERY MONTH IN THE MURDOCH PRESS 750 700 650 600 550 500 450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec ALL THE DAYS ISLAM MADE THE FRONT PAGE IN THE MURDOCH PRESS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 8 OnePath Network | Islam in the Media 2017 THE MOST OVERBLOWN EVENTS OF THE YEAR OnePath Network | Islam in the Media 2017 9 Whilst a general overview clearly shows just how disproportionate the negative coverage of Islam is, it’s There are enough only when you zoom in and see the actual issues that negative articles written every day the obsessive and unnecessary nature of the coverage in the Murdoch becomes clear. press to fill a two- And it wasn’t just about terrorism. Many of the most page spread. absurd and overblown examples of coverage come from issues that the Murdoch press highlighted by themselves, dragging the rest of Australia into their worldview. Here’s a couple of ridiculous highlights from a year of crazy coverage. 10 OnePath Network | Islam in the Media 2017 The War on Terror With the number of incendiary front-pages in 2017 about government and police policy regarding terrorism, a casual observer would not be faulted for thinking that Australia was actively engaged in daily combat on its streets. In fact, it would hardly be surprising if that was the perception in the offices of the Daily Telegraph and The Australian. Featuring front-page headlines like “This Means War” (Daily Telegraph, July 17), “Enemy at the Gates” (March 3) and “In the Firing Line” (May 22), The Daily Telegraph took great pains to terrify its audience about the threat of terrorism in Australia. A number of ‘exclusives’ claimed that “there is nothing stopping scores of barbaric homegrown jihadists, including brutes waging war for ISIS, from lawfully returning to the country” (Daily Telegraph, March 3), with “deadly extremists who have fought overseas.. roaming our streets because frustrated authorities don’t have enough evidence to put them behind bars” (Daily Telegraph, May 29), as well as the news that “NSW police will now carry military-style assault rifles on our streets to protect us from deranged terrorist In reality though, these ‘exclusives’ referred to the opinions of a small number of politicians and analysts and were in no way proportionate to any actual threat to the Australian people. OnePath Network | Islam in the Media 2017 11 Yassmin Abdel-Magied After a heated discussion on the ABC’s February 13 Q&A program, in which Yassmin Abdel-Magied claimed that Islam was “the most feminist religion”, the Sudanese-Australian engineer and activist has been endlessly scrutinised by News Ltd. owned media. Over 200 articles have been dedicated to commenting on everything from her role as an ABC presenter, to her twitter feed, to her recent move to London. In April, she also made an infamous post on her Facebook page, saying “LEST.WE.FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine….)”, using the phrase commonly associated with ANZAC day and remembrance of national values to bring attention to the crises of war and refugees both near and abroad. The post appeared only on her personal Facebook page, and was taken down and retracted within an hour. That, however, didn’t stop the post being highlighted and sensationalised as much as possible, with 5 front pages and over 100 articles in News Ltd. newspapers describing the comments as “offensive” (Daily Telegraph, 27 April) a “real sin” (Herald Sun, 28 April) and a “hateful… vile slur” (Daily Telegraph, 26 April). The coverage drummed up immense anger and hatred on social media, with a conservative commentator on radio station 2GB, Prue Macsween, saying that she would be “tempted to run her over” if she saw her on the street. 12 OnePath Network | Islam in the Media 2017 Punchbowl Boys High School Punchbowl Boys High School was the target of a number of supposed controversies throughout the year. The first came with the dismissal of principal Chris Griffiths after allegedly refusing to implement the state government’s deradicalisation program (Daily Telegraph, 3 March). Then came the incendiary headlines “Allah Allah Allah, Oi Oi Oi” (Daily Telegraph, March 13) and “Behead of the Class” (Daily Telegraph, March 16), which claimed the school was a hotbed of radicalisation, with kids in year 5 “using religious language” and “chanting the Koran”, implying that these were worrying examples of indoctrination and extremism, as well as claiming the “infamous” school was disrespecting
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