Muslims are increasingly framed in Western media as cultural threats rather than religious minorities

Evidence

Patterns of media coverage demonstrate that Muslims have become increasingly represented as a cultural threat to the Western liberal way of life (Ahmed and Matthes, 2017). This critical shift in the media’s scrutiny of the ‘Britishness’ of Muslims became even more pronounced after the London terrorist attacks of 7/7. Media narratives about Muslims become framed as what Morey and Yaqin (2011) describe as ‘a project of national repair and cultural retrenchment’ (p. 66). — Nadia Haq, ‘The National Media Just Sees Muslims…, 13

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is the 7/7 inflection point a genuine causal break in framing or just the point where scholars started measuring it? Tracing pre- and post-2005 corpora would settle this.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s published piece on immodesty moral panics — both trace how dress/religion markers get recruited into ‘national repair’ projects. — connects to: Media imagery drives public bias against Muslims and Arabs — Sahar F. Aziz, Sticks and Stones, the Words That Hurt:…, 74