Australia: Bali reporting anti-Muslim?

The media's style of reporting about the recent bombings in Bali as a religious instead of a crime story was criticized as an example of the negative perception of Muslims. "We're still in the mode of representing criminal stories as religious stories and somehow we've got to get out of reflex of seeing it as a Muslim thing rather than a criminal thing," said Peter Manning, former head of news and current affairs at Channel Seven and the ABC and now adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Technology in Sydney, reports The Age.

He went on saying that "Overwhelming these people are represented as Muslim warriors when, in fact, they are criminal lunatics - they are no more religious than the people who have been involved in Melbourne crime gangs are Christians ... I think it's part of our cultural baggage - I don't think Australia handles racism very well on all sorts of levels, and the way it thinks about Arabs and Muslims is part of the problem."

Last year, Manning published the results of his two-year study where he analyzed the representations of Muslim and Arabic people in the two Australian newspapers The Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald, before and after 9/11. The study found that asylum seekers had been presented as "tricky, ungrateful and undeserving".

Source: The Age through EJC-Newsletter