Journalists’ imagined audience shapes how they represent minority groups

Evidence

The study uncovers significant differences in the experiences of national and local journalists when it comes to reporting on stories involving Muslims. These findings demonstrate how different interpretations and understandings of journalism’s roles and responsibilities to their audiences lead to different ways of representing Muslims. In this article, I discuss the implications of these findings for how journalism practices can either perpetuate long-standing media biases or create the necessary conditions for fairer, more balanced coverage. Using Charles Taylor’s concept of social imaginaries, I discuss how the interviews with local journalists reflected a significantly different social imaginary of their audiences compared to that of national journalists. Muslims were seen to be an integral part of the local communities they served rather than the problematic ‘Other’ as seen in national newspaper coverage. This inclusive social imaginary became reflective of the practices of local newspapers, both in terms of their own journalistic identity and the stories they produced. — Nadia Haq, ‘The National Media Just Sees Muslims…, 9

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Charles Taylor’s ‘social imaginaries’ as the analytic frame for the study.
• DEEPTHINKING: Reframes media bias as downstream of an imagined audience rather than of individual prejudice or editorial diktat.
• XREF: connects to: A journalist’s source network shapes which narrative of a protest they produce — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 416