Anti-Muslim bias in national newspapers operates as systemic normalised practice, not overt racism

Evidence

While almost all the journalists I interviewed projected a critical view of this anti-Muslim bias within national newspapers, there was a sense that these views were embedded as almost normal within the fabric of the national British press industry. Rather than reflecting an overt and direct anti-Muslim racism or Islamophobia, the separation and differentiation of the Muslim ‘Other’ had become the systemic norm for reporting on stories about Muslims. … Part of this relates to the long-standing lack of diversity within national newspaper organisations (Poole, 2019), but also a failure to recognise Muslims as an integral part of the national social imaginary. — Nadia Haq, ‘The National Media Just Sees Muslims…, 35

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Reframes Islamophobia from individual prejudice to a structural default baked into routine newsroom practice — a distinction that reshapes how media bias should be diagnosed and remedied.
• XREF: Connects to Charles Mills’ ‘racial contract’ and Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ — the national social imaginary as an exclusionary construct.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘national social imaginary’ as the analytic frame: who counts as part of ‘us’ in the imagined national public.