The Representation of Islamism in the UK press

Brookes, Gavin and McEnery, Anthony and Clarke, Isobelle (2023) The Representation of Islamism in the UK press. In: Media Language on Islam and Muslims : Terminologies and their Effects. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 57-81. ISBN 9783031374616

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Abstract

This chapter explores the language that newspapers published in the UK use to represent Islamism. The chapter studies 22 years of UK national press reporting on the topic. Working with a very large volume of data, we use the approach of corpus linguistics to allow us to be able to account for the use of words referring to Islamism. This is an advantage of the corpus approach that this chapter uses. It allows us to look at a far larger body of real-life language use (typically millions, and sometimes billions, of words) than is feasible using purely qualitative approaches. Using this approach, we look at the terms Islamism, Islamist(s) and political Islam. The results show a skewed representation of Islamism, and a failure, at times, to distinguish apart Islam and Islamism in the UK press. Accordingly, the chapter concludes with some comments on how reporting of Islam and Islamism could be improved.