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chapter 19 Pluralism and the Press’s Blind Spots: The Coverage of Religious Diversity at Home and Abroad It did not take the Boston Herald long to speculate that the October 1999 crash of the EgyptAir flight might involve terrorism. There was no shortage of suspects, the newspaper wrote on the day after the disaster: the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, the al-Jihad organization that assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981, the groups responsible for the 1997 tourist massacre in Luxor or the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.1 The Herald’s coverage was only the beginning of a steady flow of stories in the U.S. media suggesting that terrorism was involved in the crash of the Egyptian jet in the ocean off NewYork. Of 772 stories found in a Nexis search for the week after the crash, 45 mentioned “terrorism” or “terrorist” (almost exactly equal to the 46 that speculated about “mechanical” failure).2 However, it was not this speculation that generated the most controversy in the wake of the EgyptAir crash. Within a week of the disaster, stories began to appear that, quoting unnamed American government sources, blamed the plane’s downing on a copilot suspected of committing suicide. In the week following the crash, 72 stories (roughly 10 percent of the total) mentioned “suicide ” in connection with the tragedy.3 The tone of most of these stories was ominous and the implications clear: there was something sinister about an Islamic prayer uttered by the copilot of the doomed airliner.No matter that the investigation into the cause of the crash had only just begun, that previous stories in the American press speculating about the involvement of Arab terrorists (such as those surrounding the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building) proved to be unfounded, that this kind of reporting and similar coverage around the country would foster a dip19 .264-270/Unde 1/15/02, 9:43 AM 264 Pluralism and the Press’s Blind Spots 265 lomatic rift in the relations between Egypt and the United States. The frame in which the U.S.media cover Islam and perceived Islamic terrorist activity is clear: jump to conclusions first,put out reports based on them,and then worry about correcting the record later, if at all. One thing must be said for the U.S. media’s approach to religion reporting. Christianity is not singled out for problematic coverage. Other religions often are treated with the same confusion, negative stereotyping, and lack of sympathetic understanding that can make their way into press reporting of Christianity .In particular, Islam and its adherents are presented almost exclusively in the context of the hostilities and violence that have come to be associated with Middle East politics. It is something of an irony that the U.S. news media— which can demonstrate such discomfort in dealing with issues growing out of Christian belief—still so readily relate to Islam through the prism of the rivalry between Islam and Christianity that dates back centuries. (The Canadian press also has this problem, at least according to a 1999 study by the Canadian Islamic Congress that found Muslims were persistently portrayed as violent in the Canadian media.)4 Even when Middle-Eastern extremists are behind terrorists acts, the American media often do not do enough to distinguish between the actions of terrorists and the views of the rest of the Islamic world. The media enthusiasm for comparing the attacks on theWorld Trade Center and the Pentagon to Pearl Harbor and emphasizing such cries as “The U.S. is at war” tended to agitate rather than illuminate and made it easier for the public to get the idea that a people or a culture—or more to the point, the adherents of a particular religion—might justifiably become a target for retaliation. Despite voices of sympathy for the United States from moderate Arab and Palestinian groups, the tone of much of the press coverage certainly helped fan the anger that led to assaults on Islamic mosques and hostile acts directed at people of Middle-Eastern descent in the United States.The attacks directed at Islamic places of worship are evidence that some Americans—taking their cue from the American media that tend to use Islamic as an adjective for a host of pejorative terms (terrorist, extremist, fundamentalist )—see Islam in political rather than religious terms. They mistake Middle-Eastern antipathy for U.S. policy as antipathy...

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