Associations between Islam, Extremism, and Terrorism in the British National Press 1998-2019

Baker, Paul (2023) Associations between Islam, Extremism, and Terrorism in the British National Press 1998-2019. In: Media Language on Islam and Muslims : Terminologies and Their Effects. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 83-106. ISBN 9783031374616

Abstract

In this chapter, I examine the extent to which the British press have associated Muslims and Islam with the concepts of terrorism and extremism. I carry out a corpus-assisted discourse analysis on almost 1 million British newspaper articles which refer to Muslims and Islam, published between 1998 and 2009. In order to identify whether language use has changed over time, the dataset is divided into three time periods. I compare standardised frequencies of terms relating to terror and strength of belief, noting that references to terror have increased over time, although qualitative analysis indicates that the meanings of terms like devout and extremist are not fixed. Over time there is a gradual avoidance of labelling Muslims as extremist, devout or liberal. Instead, labels of strength of belief have been attributed to abstractions, with Islam and Islamist both more likely over time to be associated with extremist belief. Additionally, analysis of collocates of terms relating to Islam indicates that over time extremism is more likely to be associated with acts of war or terror. The analysis concludes that whilst some sections of the press have sought to reduce representations of Muslims as extreme, the association continues to hold.