Rick Moore, professor and chair in the Department of Media, recently published an article in The Journal of Religion, Media, and Digital Culture.
The study investigated news coverage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Though the World Cup has been occurring for almost one hundred years, this tournament was the first to be hosted by a Muslim-majority country. Moore was interested in how American and British newspapers would prepare readers for the time they might stay in the host country of Qatar.
Moore’s interest was spurred by the fact that much of the scholarly investigation into press coverage of Islam has written about the religion as it has protruded into what we normally think of as “The West.” Major areas of interest for researchers have been topics such as terrorism or conflicts caused by Muslims immigrating to European countries. The Qatar world cup offered an opportunity to see how Western media might conceptualize the Islamic faith in its own environment, when Westerners are guests, not hosts.
In studying stories from a six-month period before the event, he found that themes developed in the stories mostly circled around dress code, romantic/sexual behavior and alcohol consumption. The stories generally served as a guide to how expectations in Qatar would be starkly different from those in the visitors’ home countries. Interestingly, however, the extent to which reporters focused on the Islamic faith being the basis for differences varied between these subjects. In fact, for many of the articles, the religious basis for Qatari’s cultural norms was ignored altogether. Moore suggests this opens up avenues for future research. Much of the traditional scholarship on media coverage of Islam suggests its biggest problem is “Islamophobia,” a significant ethical concern. Western media coverage of the Qatar World Cup suggests an interesting alternative possibility. Moore asks whether media reporting about religion that ignores the distinctives of a particular faith might also pose threats to that faith, and be something against which reporters should be equally concerned.
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