Terrorist representation of muslim vs. Non-muslim perpetrators in the UK and North American news coverage : the cases of Orlando Pulse and Christchurch mosque shootings

Abstract

News media channels and their coverage have had grave impact on the public that is manifested in the discourse of the reporting of many important topics as they disseminate information to the public. Their influence is undeniable and evident in the way certain issues and subjects are discussed. In the context of Muslim vs. non-Muslim perpetrated violent shooting events, there is a lack of secondary literature that outright compares how media outlets cover those events in the sense of what the incident and the shooter are labeled. This project aims to assess how two main terroristic events, the Orland Pulse and Christchurch Mosques shootings are covered by North American and UK media as the Orlando shooting was perpetrated by a Muslim with alleged ISIS ties and the Christchurch shootings were perpetrated by a white male with ties to right-wing entities. By relying on discourse analysis as the main analysis method, 10 newspaper outlets from both regions have been selected and 20 articles analyzed. The aim of the research, secondary research, methodology, findings, and conclusions have been presented in a comprehensive and easy to navigate website which can be accessed here. Findings indicate that in all articles (10 in total) covering the Pulse nightclub shooting (perpetrated by a Muslim), labels of terrorism and/or terrorist have been found while in articles (also 10 in total) covering the Christchurch Mosque shootings (perpetrated by a non-Muslim), only 3 have been found to label the event as terrorism with the rest opting for other depictions of both the incident (e.g., act of violence, act of terror) and shooter (e.g., lone wolf attacker, right wing extremist, suspected white supremacist). Findings have shown that there is an evident discrepancy in how both events are labeled and portrayed in Western newspapers.