The MCB’s Centre for Media Monitoring has released a ground-breaking report entitled: “How The British Media Reports Terrorism”.
This report has found that media coverage of terrorism has been consistently inconsistent, albeit with recent improvements following the Christchurch attack in which Brenton Tarrant killed 51 Muslim worshippers. There is significant disparity in the association of “terror” between so-called Muslim and non-Muslim perpetrators: over half of the terms “terrorist”, “terrorism” or “terror” were used with the terms “Islam” or “Muslim” – almost nine times more than when the perpetrator was identified with the terms “far-right”, “neo-Nazi” or “white supremacist”.
This timely and groundbreaking report details CfMM’s own quantitative and qualitative analysis of 16 terrorist attacks between 2015 – 2020 in America, Britain and Europe, alongside a comprehensive section on the Christchurch attack.
CfMM analysed over 230,000 articles published in 31 national online media outlets to show the inconsistencies in the coverage of terrorist attacks, depending on the background of the perpetrator. The report also includes feedback from editorial directors, managing editors, editors and security correspondents who attended a CfMM roundtable on “Reporting of Terrorism”.