Muslim Assassins Receive More Media Coverage in The US Than Their Non-Muslim Counterparts

• Terror attacks by Muslims receive more attention by media
• Attacks committed by white men are not given much importance
• People are increasingly becoming fearful of Muslims

New Delhi, July 5, 2017: As per an academic study, the terror attacks committed by Muslims receive greater than approximately five times media coverage as compared to those performed by non-Muslims in America. According to the researchers from Georgia State University, there existed a 449 percent growth in media presentation when the assassin was a Muslim as per the analysis of terrorist attacks in the US between 2011 and 2015.

A survey found that even though Muslims carry out only 12.4 percent of attacks during the period of study, they get 41.4 percent of the news coverage which suggests that the media disproportionately scares people of the Muslim terrorists which builds up an avoidable hatred for Muslims. One way to overcome and prevent this is by covering news more evenly and proportionately as their fears are highly misplaced.

Scientists considered US newspaper coverage of all terrorist attacks in America and computed the articles committed to each attack. It was found that the Boston Marathon bombing which took place in 2013 committed by two Muslim attackers and killed three people, comprised of almost 20 percent of all the news coverage relating to terror attacks in the US during a period of five years. In a sharp contrast to this, a massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012 that killed six people and was undertaken by a white man received only 3.8 percent of coverage.

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A mass shooting carried out by Dylan Roof who is a white man, at an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, which left nine people dead got it hands on just 7.4 per cent of media coverage. Moreover, an attack by Frazier Glenn Miller in 2014 on a Kansas synagogue killed three but received a share in just 3.3 percent of reports.

The claim made by President Donald Trump in February that the attacks committed by Muslims receive less coverage is unsupported but he was right in saying that the media fails to provide enough coverage to some terrorist attacks.

Prepared by Harsimran Kaur of NewsGram. Twitter: @Hkaur1025