How Muslims are represented in the press: a corpus-driven analysis of American and Pakistani online newspaper articles

In the present work the issue is addressed of how Muslims and Islam are linguistically represented by US and Pakistani media. Previous studies on this topic show that journalists tend to represent Islam in negative terms, talking about Muslim men mostly as terrorists, Muslim women as victims of their own culture and all Muslims as a monolithic group of people of ‘other’ (i.e. them contrasting with us). The aim of this study is to identify recurrent linguist patterns in how Muslims and Islam are talked about in online articles from the American newspaper New York Times and the Pakistani newspaper The Dawn. The data were collected through the Sketch Engine platform (www.SketchEngine.eu), which also serves as corpus-building software, directly from the newspapers’ websites (www.nytimes.com and www.dawn.com). By adopting a corpus-driven approach, recurrent word combinations are identified so as to determine what the texts are about and what stance or viewpoint they convey. The research questions addressed are the following: 1) what are the most recurrent topics/notions mentioned? 2) How are Islam and Muslims talked about? 3) Do media mostly report good news or bad news about Islam and Muslims? 4) How similarly or differently are Islam and Muslims characterized in the two corpora? The results provide partial support for the findings of previous studies. That is, on the one hand, both in the New York Times and The Dawn newspapers, Islam and Muslims were often represented in negative terms, within a discourse of violence and conflict, a distinction was often made between us (non-Muslims) and them (Muslims), and most of the collocates of the words referring to Muslims carried negative semantic prosody. On the other hand, one unexpected pattern emerged, that is, although The Dawn newspaper is supposed to be the Muslim League mouthpiece, the phenomenon of ‘othering’ was detected there, too, with regard to the collocates of the word Muslim. Some marked differences in line with the findings of previous studies emerged as well: in the American paper, the semantic fields of conflict and violence were more frequent than in the Pakistani paper; the Pakistani paper focused on politics more than the American paper; and the American paper focused on radical Islam, while the Pakistani paper focused on liberal Islam.