There’s an interesting and provocative letter published in today’s Guardian that claims the Leveson inquiry has
so far failed to adequately address unfair media coverage as it relates to less prominent cases, including those relating to Muslims and Islam, focusing as it does on the impact of phone hacking on celebrities and other high-profile individuals.
The letter calls for an “alternative inquiry” to investigate
widespread and systematic discriminatory practices in reporting on Muslims and Islam in the British media.
The signatories include a wide array of British Muslim community leaders, activists and journalists, as well as non-Muslim figures like human-rights campaigner Bianca Jagger, writer Michael Rosen, Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, Lib Dem peer Navnit Dholakia, Conservative member of the London Assembly Andrew Boff, Green Party Assembly member Jenny Jones and former Daily Star reporter Richard Peppiatt.
They point out:
Over the past decade, a number of academic studies have indicated a worrying and disproportionate trend towards negative, distorted and even fabricated reports in media coverage of the Muslim community. Recent research at Cambridge University concludes that “a wider set of representations of Islam would signify a welcome change to reporting practices. Muslims deserve a better press than they have been given in the past decade.”
You can read the full letter (and full list of signatories) here.
You can also read my take on the media and Islamophobia, from 2008 (when I worked at Channel 4 and commissioned a Dispatches documentary on the subject), here.
Content from our partners
Related
