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The warm welcome Americans and Europeans have given Ukrainians in 2022 contrasts sharply with the uneven – and frequently hostile – policies toward Syrian refugees in the mid-2010s. Political scientist David Laitin has highlighted the role that religious identities play in this dynamic.
As he pointed out in a recent interview, Syrian refugees were “mostly Muslim and faced higher degrees of discrimination than will the Ukrainians, who are largely of Christian heritage.”
The media provide information that shapes such attitudes toward Muslims. A 2007 Pew Research Center survey of Americans found that people’s negative opinions on Muslims were mostly influenced by what they heard and read in the media. Communications scholar Muniba Saleem and colleagues have demonstrated the link between media information and “stereotypic beliefs, negative emotions and support for harmful policies” toward Muslim Americans.
To better grasp the evolution of media portrayals of Muslims and Islam, our 2022 book, “Covering Muslims: American Newspapers in Comparative Perspective,” tracked the tone of hundreds of thousands of articles over decades. We found overwhelmingly negative coverage, not only in the United States but also in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
