A study published by a sociologist has revealed that fear-mongering non-governmental anti-Muslim organisations have been heavily influencing US media since 9/11, their messages seeping into news articles and television reporting and drawing their ethos from the fringes, straight into the mainstream.
What's perhaps most troubling about the results is how these minor groups, which would ordinarily receive little or no air time, have gained an element of respect that has led to them receiving more funding and coupling with influential bodies. Their influence is such that they have even been able to paint mainstream Muslim organisations as radical, says the study.
"The vast majority of organisations competing to shape public discourse about Islam after the September 11 attacks delivered pro-Muslim messages, yet my study shows that journalists were so captivated by a small group of fringe organisations that they came to be perceived as mainstream," the paper's author, University of North Carolina assistant professor of sociology Christopher Bail, told Wired.co.uk.
"Anti-Muslim fringe organisations dominated the mass media via displays of fear and anger. Institutional amplification of this emotional energy, I argue, created a gravitational pull or 'fringe effect' that realigned inter-organisational networks and altered the contours of mainstream discourse itself."
Bail and his team used plagiarism detection software to compare 1,084 press releases produced by 120 different organisations with more than 50,000 television transcripts and newspaper articles produced between 2001 and 2008. The software picked up ****ing similarities between the releases and stories from news outlets including the
New York Times,
USA Today, the
Washington Times,
CBS News,
CNN and
Fox News Channel.
Read the rest here:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/...ce-on-us-media
Nothing we didn't already know but at least now people can have even more stats to back it up when we say it instead of calling it a "conspiracy theory". That seems to be a word that runs rampant on this forum whenever someone offers an alternative point of view.
Feel free to download and read the research here:
http://asr.sagepub.com/content/77/6/855.abstract