Introduction
This paper examines media coverage of the “ground zero mosque” controversy over a proposal to build an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan a few blocks away from the site of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. It considers how this coverage was framed in context of Western media depictions of Muslims since September 11, 2001. In particular, it examines parallels between news coverage of the “ground zero mosque” and of false rumors during the 2008 presidential campaign that Sen. Barack Obama was a Muslim rather than a Christian.
Kumar (2010) found five dominant frames that have been used in Western media since the September 11 attacks to describe Muslims and their religion:
"1. Islam is a monolithic religion.
2. Islam is a uniquely sexist religion.
3. The “Muslim mind” is incapable of rationality and science.
4. Islam is inherently violent.
5. The West spreads democracy, whereas Islam spawns terrorism." (Kumar, 2010, pp. 256-257)
These frames, Kumar (2010) wrote, stemmed from a centuries-long history of “Orientalism,” a view that justified colonization with the assumption that the West, with its cultural and political roots in ancient Greece, was superior to other civilizations. Orientalism, she wrote, “placed European Caucasians at the top of the racial hierarchy and colonized peoples close to the bottom” (p. 258).
In the 1990s, Ibrahim (2010) noted, “Islam became the global threat that replaced communism as the enemy of the West,” filling a “foreign policy vacuum” after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union (p. 112). After the September 11 attacks, television newscasts depicted Muslims outside the U.S. “as fanatic, irrational, America-hating and violent oppressors of women,” Ibrahim wrote. “The people on the streets of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Arab countries were viewed as a collective threat to American interests” (p. 122). In this environment, Kumar (2010) noted, President George W. Bush endorsed a “clash of civilizations” view of a Muslim enemy that was a threat to the U.S. in a “world polarized along the lines of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ ” (p. 259).
“This rhetoric,” Kumar (2010) wrote, “is not restricted to the political elite and the mainstream media; it is more widespread” (p. 260), offering examples such as caricatured images of violent, angry, bearded men with turbans in left-wing publications such as The Progressive and Atlantic Monthly. “When progressives adopt positions similar to those of the mainstream,” she wrote, “we can indeed argue that Islamophobia and Orientalism are now taken-for-granted frames of reference” (p. 260).
Journalists in the U.S., meanwhile, tended to accept such framing by political leaders, Ibrahim (2010) wrote:
Communism did not receive favorable coverage during the Cold War, as American journalism assumed that capitalism was the most valid political, economic and social ideology. In this example, we find a precedent that journalists have (consciously or not) adopted policies of the government without questioning or demonstrating significant independence from the dominant paradigm. This happened to American journalists in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. (Ibrahim, 2010, p. 112)
In the aftermath of September 11, there was an exception to the framing of Muslims as the enemy. Political leaders and news personalities cautioned against hate crimes against Muslims living in the U.S. (Ibrahim, 2010; Rich, 2010a), who were portrayed in the media in “stories that highlighted Islam as an integral part of American life” (Ibrahim, 2010, p. 112).
However, Ibrahim (2010) noted, the depiction of peaceful Muslims in the U.S. was broadcast on network newscasts alongside the frame of Islam as a violent threat from outside the country. “There was a salient difference,” she wrote, “in the way that Muslims who live in the U.S. were framed as those who are ‘with us’ and those living outside the US as ‘against us,’ which was a reflection of the doctrine President Bush espoused at the time” (p. 118).
The “Obama is a Muslim” rumor
The “Obama is a Muslim” rumor originated in part from a news release by a right-wing blogger a few weeks after Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, according to Weeks and Southwell (2010). “Although the mainstream media ignored the release,” they wrote, “the conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com picked up the story, and the rumor slowly began to gain traction” (p. 343).
According to Weeks and Southwell (2010), the rumor “was very important nationally and potentially impacted some voters’ decisions” (p. 342), with 12% of the public believing that Obama was a Muslim. Although the rumor started with right-wing blogs and “anti-Obama crusaders,” they wrote, mainstream news organizations covered it in June 2008 through Election Day. “Although much of the coverage was intended to dispel the rumor,” they wrote, “the mere fact that the mainstream media covered it at all likely had an impact on the electorate in the aggregate” (p. 342).
Based on a survey of the volume of Internet queries on the Google search engine, Weeks and Southwell (2010) found support for the idea that “mainstream media coverage, especially television coverage, did influence the public salience of the rumor that Barack Obama was secretly Muslim” (p. 354).
They found no significant support for the idea that newspaper coverage led readers to search online for more information about the rumor, noting that based on their content analysis, “Most of the newspaper articles are written to dispel the rumor. Many are editorials or columns that put forth detailed and compelling arguments about why the rumor is not true” (p. 355). Cable news programs on channels such as MSNBC and Fox News Channel, however, “often devoted entire segments of their shows to discussion of the rumor” (p. 356). The format of these programs, they noted, may have increased uncertainty among viewers, leading them to search on Google for more information about the rumor:
"Rather than outright dispelling the rumor, these shows tended to center the debate on whether the rumor was a legitimate topic of discussion. Occasionally, an anti-Obama commentator would appear and argue that the public needed to know for certain that Obama was not Muslim before electing him president. By devoting so much airtime to discussion of the rumor and allowing pundits to add fuel to it, the cable programs likely increased the public’s uncertainty about the Obama=Muslim rumor, which may have led to increased information seeking online and ultimately the more robust television agenda-setting effects displayed here." (Weeks & Southwell, 2010, p. 356)
The “ground zero mosque”
According to Rich (2010b), anger over government bank bailouts initiated in 2008 during the Bush administration inspired a “mad as hell” Tea Party movement. After Obama’s inauguration, “anger tilted toward Washington in general and the new president in particular.” In the 2010 election season, Rich (2010b) contended, “the radical right’s anger” lacked focus, but became “more likely to claim minorities like gays, Latinos and Muslims as collateral damage.” The mosque controversy, according to Rich (2010a), “was not motivated by a serious desire to protect America from the real threat of terrorists lurking at home and abroad—a threat this furor has in all likelihood exacerbated—but by the potential short-term rewards of winning votes by pandering to fear during an election season.”
Indeed, the proposed “mosque” is not at the World Trade Center site; it’s three blocks away (Rendall & Kane, 2010; Rich, 2010a). For that matter, Rich (2010a) wrote, “It’s not a mosque, but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room.”
According to Rich (2010a), plans for the center, known as Park51, were first reported by The New York Times on December 9, 2009, then mainly ignored by other news outlets. Laura Ingraham, filling in as host of Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor, endorsed plans for the center two weeks later, telling the wife of the project’s organizer, “I like what you’re doing here” (Rich, 2010a). Later, however, anti-Muslim bloggers criticized the project, describing it as a scheme by Muslims “to ‘conquer’ the hallowed site of the September 11 attacks” (Rendall & Kane, 2010, p. 8). “Created on small anti-Muslim blogs,” Rendall and Kane (2010) wrote, “the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ framing was eventually adopted by bigger right-wing outlets before making extensive inroads into broader corporate media” (p. 8).
In May, according to Rich (2010a), Rupert Murdoch’s The New York Post “and the rest of the Murdoch empire” began promoting the idea that “radical Islamists” were behind the “ground zero mosque.” Former Republican vice presidential candidate and Fox News contributor Sarah Palin, Rich (2010a) noted, called the center “a ‘stab in the heart’ of Americans who ‘still have that lingering pain from 9/11.’ ” The controversy soon spread to other news outlets, with coverage of the issue in publications such as The New York Times and Newsweek and on cable news channels such as CNN, according to Rendall and Kane (2010). “While challenging some of the ‘facts’ that opponents put forward,” they wrote, “and refraining from calling for a ban on the community center, the more centrist corporate media entertained the lies and bigotry of anti-Muslim forces to an alarming degree” (p. 8).
By August, again substituting as host on The O’Reilly Factor, Ingraham denounced the project and blamed Obama for the controversy, according to Rendall and Kane (2010), asking: “So why is Barack Obama letting this go on? Why is the president of the United States at his already low approval numbers, why is he letting this continue as it is?” (p. 9).
Conclusion
After the September 11 attacks, the media offered contradictory frames describing Muslims and their religion. Muslims inside the U.S. were described as peaceful, while Islam overseas was depicted as an extremist, violent threat to the American way of life. During the 2008 presidential campaign, the distinction between these frames was blurred. A false rumor that Obama was a Muslim—and thus a threat to the U.S.—spread from bloggers to right-wing media and finally to numerous corporate media outlets. The “ground zero mosque” controversy followed a similar path, Rich noted:
"Were McCain in the White House, Fox and friends would have kept ignoring Park51. But it's an irresistible target in our current election year because it revives the most insidious anti-Obama narrative of the many Fox promoted in the previous election year: Obama the closet Muslim and secret madrassa alumnus. In the much discussed latest Pew poll, a record number of Americans (nearing 20 percent) said that our Christian president practices Islam. And they do not see that as a good thing." (Rich, 2010a)
References
Ibrahim, Dina (2010). The framing of Islam on network news following the September 11th attacks. The International Communication Gazette, 72(1), 111-125.
Kumar, Deepa (2010). Framing Islam: The resurgence of Orientalism during the Bush II era. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 34(3), 254-277.
Rendall, Steve & Kane, Alex (2010, October). The media’s construction of the ‘ground zero mosque’: How Islamaphobic blogs manufactured a controversy. Extra!, 8-9.
Rich, Frank (2010a, August 22). How Fox betrayed Petraeus. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22rich.html
Rich, Frank (2010b, October 16). The rage won’t end on Election Day. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/opinion/17rich.html
Weeks, Brian & Southwell, Brian (2010). The symbiosis of news coverage and aggregate online search behavior: Obama, rumors, and presidential politics. Mass Communication and Society, 13(4), 341-360.
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