Muslim Women According to the New York Times: A Post-September 11, Reading of American News Coverage

Prior to the Iranian revolution, the U.S. news media rarely mentioned Muslim nations or individual persons. Newspapers and broadcasts devoted large amounts of time and resources to covering the event. The uptick in interest quickly died down and that region of the world was once again left out of the news. That was, until the attacks of September 11, 2001. Unlike the loss of interest that occurred in 1979, U.S. journalists remained fixated on Islam. Between the years of 2001 and 2015, few large scale terror attacks occurred, but Islam continued to be “the news.” Attempts to explain the religion or justify actions taken against Muslim-majority countries took up print space and air time since then. The coverage of events, since 9/11, has been colored by the attacks of that day. Beliefs about Islam and misconceptions about Muslims have been propagated via United Staets news media to the general public that can be seen in much of the coverage of Islam in the U.S. No one has suffered from the ill-informed media more than the Islamic women. Coverage of Muslim women in the New York Times will represent this phenomenon: a country-wide disrespect for and misunderstanding of Islam, which will not accurately portray the situation of Muslim women at large. This paper will address the representations of Islamic women in the New York Times between 2002 and 2014