Publication date:

15 April 2016

Length of book:

296 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498509879

The representation of Islam is unquestionably a critical test for comparing journalistic reporting across countries and cultures. The Islamic religion has weight in international reporting (defining what we termed “foreign Islam”), but it is also the religion of numerically important minority groups residing in Europe (“national Islam”). The first part of the book is “setting the scene.” Three chapters provide insights in dominant patterns of the representation of Islam as detected by various authors and studies involved with Islam representation in Europe. Part two, the core section of the book, contributes to the development of the field of comparative journalism studies by comparing several countries and six media systems in Western Europe: the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (Flanders), the French-speaking part of Belgium (Wallonia), the Netherlands, France, Germany, and the U.K. Part three of this book presents two reception studies, one qualitative and the other quantitative. Equally important, as the bulk of attention goes to Western Europe, is the extension towards the representation of Muslims and Islam outside Western Europe. Part four of the book is devoted to the representation of Islam in some of the so-called BRICs-countries: Russia, China, and India.
Given the continued politicization of religion and the exclusion of Muslims in many European countries and beyond, studying media representations of Islam is of great importance. This well-structured edited collection, based on an international project funded by the Research Foundation, Flanders, gathers a range of empirically grounded studies investigating the media portrayal of Muslims and Islam across a variety of cultural and political contexts and from different perspectives.... Although each chapter can be read as a stand-alone study, the book as a whole also advances a number of more general arguments about the factors that influence and help explain the patterns found in the news coverage. These include the difference between the coverage of internal or domestic Islam and external or foreign Islam, differences rooted in the political orientations of news outlets and specificities stemming from national contexts. Together, this valuable collection thus brings not only an important descriptive analysis of representations of Islam but also helps us understand why these representations are as they are.