Treating audiences as citizens rather than consumers produces less Othering coverage.

Evidence

From these accounts, it is possible to envisage the role of local journalism as a form of counter-public discourse, where journalists’ modes of address are very consciously presented against the dominant Othering narratives of national newspapers. Viewing their local publics as localised citizens rather than news consumers seeking out the latest sensationalist story on Muslims enabled the local journalists to recognise and reject the homogenised, sensationalist representations of Muslims that dominate national press coverage in favour of a more multicultural and multi-perspectival reporting of news events (Deuze, 2005). Deuze describes this approach as one which shifts the orientation of journalists towards a multicultural society in which news becomes contextualised accordingly and where the positions of minorities are redefined. — Nadia Haq, ‘The National Media Just Sees Muslims…, 58

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The counter-public frame reframes local journalism as an oppositional discursive formation rather than a scaled-down version of national news; it implies the audience-conception a journalist holds determines the representational politics they produce.
• SEED: Angle: ‘What If the Fix for Media Islamophobia Is Local’ — argue that the counter-public function of regional press is structural, not just a matter of nicer reporters.