Media perception of Islam in politicians and journalists

Epistemic interest and research question:

For years, an "Islamization of debates" has been evident in the public discourse regarding migration issues. Questions of integration are increasingly being negotiated as "Islam questions" and linked to the fundamental question of the religion's compatibility with so-called "Western values”.

These discussions are accompanied by established social defensive attitudes against Muslims and those who are labeled as such. The Bertelsmann Foundation's Religion Monitor, for example, shows that about half of the population classifies "Islam" as threatening. These aversions reached a populist climax in the PEGIDA movement ("Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the Occident"), which formed in 2014. With it, an aggressive ‘völkisch’ movement was formed, which found its common denominator in contempt for democracy, hatred of “the foreign”, and especially in the demonization of Islam.

The media play a key role in shaping society's perception of Muslims and those who are identified as such. The image of Islam presented in "Western media" has been the subject of academic research for decades. Researchers in the field agree that violence- and conflict-oriented reporting has become established, which places the world's second largest religious community in a direct relationship with threats such as international terrorism. While these media tendencies have been sufficiently documented empirically, there is a gap with regard to the perspectives of those shaping discourse. This is where the research project comes in, asking questions about how discourse-shaping players from politics and the media perceive the media staging of a threatening Islam. More precisely: Are media distortions and biases of complex issues identified? And if so, what consequences does this have for their political and journalistic work?

Methods:

Group discussions and qualitative interviews with journalists and politicians

Project duration:

2018 - 2021

Project design:

The research project empirically examines the perspectives of those shaping discourse on the media staging of a threatening Islam with a focus on racism theory. It pursues the questions of how media representations are taken up in the communication of these persons and what influence the media discourse on Islam has on decision-making processes in politics and the media. The group discussions conducted pursue the goal of elaborating and reconstructing the participants' conjunctive knowledge bases and experiential spaces. In this context, conjunctive knowledge is understood as a theoretical and action-guiding knowledge that structures the everyday actions of the participants, but does not need to be made explicit because it is shared by all of them. The conjunctive experiential space is assumed to be shared professional practice. The findings from the group discussions are explored in greater depth in qualitative individual interviews.

As regards theoretical context, the project is located in the field of racism research. It takes up elaborate approaches to culturally argued racisms (Miles, Hall, Balibar) as well as recent findings from research on anti-Muslim racism (Shooman, Attia, Keskinkiliç) and synthesizes them with Pierre Bourdieu's cultural sociological analyses. The involvement in racist ideologems is not understood as a point of view that deviates from the social norm, but rather as part of social knowledge and as a habitualized perceptual option that provides players in the field with an offer for interpreting the social world.

Internal project team:

Karin Scherschel, Benedict Bazyar-Gudrich

Collaborative project:

The research project is part of a joint project that deals with the threat scenario of 'Islamist terrorism' from the perspectives of politics, the media and Muslim communities and takes the form of an empirical study. It is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). In addition to the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin (Prof. Dr. Iman Attia) and the Akkon University of Human Sciences (Prof. Dr. Andreas Bock) are involved.

Associated practice partners:

The project works with seven associated practice partners. The findings of the empirical analysis of all subprojects will be brought together and systematized so that they can be made usable for didactic purposes by the associated partners for new target groups and educational offers and can also be used in practical work.

• Rat muslimischer Studierender und Akademiker (RAMSA)
• Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD)
• RAHMA - Muslim Centre for Girls, Women and Family
• Türkische Gemeinde in Deutschland (TGD)
• Regional Centre for Education, Integration and Democracy (RAA Berlin)
• Anne Frank Educational Center
• Verband binationaler Familien und Partnerschaften