Islamophobia & the western media: A comparative critical discourse analysis of Anglo-American news media's approach to terror attacks targeting Muslims and non-muslims and the applied double standards

The main purpose of the present study is to analyze the discourse employed by the agenda-setting Anglo-American newspapers, having a wide outreach and the potential to influence public opinion and action, to cover the six devastating terrorist attacks carried out against both Muslims and non-Muslims within the last decade. In accordance with this purpose, the publicly available online archives of Anglo-American news media outlets are searched through to gather the required data to conduct this study, in consequence of which twenty-four news reports in total are selected through purposive sampling. By drawing on Teun van Dijk's qualitative and interdisciplinary Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) method, which has been initially developed to examine the discursive features of news reports and their implications, and by building on the Orientalist and post-colonial scholarship headed by Edward Said, the selected news reports are both comparatively and critically analyzed in terms of the micro and macrostructures such as the headlines, leads, visuals, sentence structures, and rhetoric embedded in their narratives. As a result of the detailed comparative and critical discourse analyses, it is determined that Anglo-American news media outlets play a pivotal role in the fabrication and amplification of Islamophobia, which has escalated specifically in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and currently manifests itself in a great variety of platforms ranging from Hollywood movies to mass media, by way of both the sweeping generalizations they make about the religion of Islam and Muslims, and double standards they systematically apply on the basis of the religious affiliation of both victims and perpetrators of the terrorist incidents. So much so that, while they associate terrorism with Islam and thus incriminating both the religion of Islam and all the Muslims around the globe for the actions of a handful of terrorists, they adopt a protectionist and humanizing stance towards the non-Muslim perpetrators whose religious affiliation they do not even mention once. Key Words: Islamophobia, Critical Discourse Analysis, Anglo-American News Media, Terrorist Attack, Double Standards, Orientalism