Our patterns of behavior in regards to the news began to change. News networks now compete for viewers, and make no mistake about it, viewers and advertising sponsors, are needed to keep the wheels of the network news machine turning.
In this modern world, if we believe that the news cycle is restrained by the size of the event, we can be sure that the size of the story is limited only by the news producer’s imagination. Nowadays the essence of the news means that we go to bed and the sky is falling, but miraculously we wake up and it has not fallen as yet.
Nearly twenty years ago authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in their book, Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media, suggested that "the press has moved toward sensationalism, entertainment, and opinion" and away from traditional values of verification, proportion, relevance, depth, and quality of interpretation.
There is one specific group of people that have been caught in the media web: Muslims. Media Smarts, Canada’s center for media and digital literacy, describes the way Islam was thrust into the global media frontline. "The American-led ‘War on Terrorism’ led to an increase in Islamophobia (fear or hatred of Islam) across the globe.
This increase in Islamophobia was in turn reflected in the way media outlets addressed and stereotyped Muslim populations."
The convergence of twenty-four-hour news and the continued heightened security alerts across the globe has consistently portrayed Muslims as violence-prone people who are entirely opposed to Western values.
It is, and always has been, the nature of the media to report on the sensational and dramatic occurrences; however, any mention of Islam or Muslims is predominantly negative.
Islamophobia is an example of how the twenty-first century media has abandoned the core values of journalism, and strive for little more than sensationalized stories that, more often than not, associate Islam with criminality and danger to "our peaceful way of life."
In 2016 the University of Cambridge released a report that shows that mainstream media reporting about Muslim communities contributes significantly to rising hostility toward Muslims in Britain.
This substantiates the findings of an Islamophobia Roundtable in Stockholm in 2014, when Erik Ullenhag, the Minister for Integration, said that since the terrorist attacks in New York, Muslims have been seen as one group not many groups or individuals.
"All people of Muslim background," he said, "are considered to share the same culture and the same views. And far too often they are portrayed in a negative context."
Nowadays the media, in all its forms and with all its tentacles, has the ability to easily construct a negative image of Islam and Muslims. Creating news and opining instead of reporting has given people the ability to choose the channel that agrees with their views. Thus whole populations are no longer exposed to other viewpoints.
There is nothing that encourages them to understand and empathize with the situations and lifestyles of diverse cultures, or even with their neighbors who have opinions that are different to the ones they hold dear.
When you add social media to the already volatile mix, we find that Muslims endure daily racial slurs, degrading photos, intimidations, and harassment campaigns. The structure of social media and each platform’s reliance on algorithms means that those with extremist views are able to connect to each other with ease.
It also means that deceptions about Muslims often live on even after being exposed.