The Paris attack did not come out of the blue

Vienna, January 8, 2015. The terrorist attack in Paris shows that only a few people have learned their lessons after the attacks of 9/11 on New York, the bombings in Madrid or London, the uproar about the Danish Muhammad cartoons and Pope Benedict’s speech in Regensburg – or have at least been willing to learn. The stereotypes in the portrayal of the “other” have not vanished, least of all in opinion-leading media. Recent data from Media Tenor International, which are presented at the Vienna New Year’s reception today, show a further deterioration: When the media reported about Muslims and Islam the tonality dropped to an unprecedented -80% surplus of negative news.

Moreover, openness for the dialogue between cultures has suffered from the increasingly hostile reporting about migrants. Refugees are regularly framed as a threat and burden and only very infrequently as a boon to the host societies – as shown in the attached analysis. For two decades - from the xenophobic riots in Sebnitz and Hoyerswerda - Media Tenor has been providing data on the interplay between media coverage and the reactions of the public. Together with the World Economic Forum the Annual Dialogue Report was presented for the first time in Davos 2008. Media Tenor has continued with this project as the C1 Dialogue in collaboration with Prince Ghazi of Jordan, the Bishop of London and the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa. When the Minaret Initiative in Switzerland raised the risk of terrorist attacks in 2009, the C1 Dialogue helped to defuse the situation with op-eds by Ali Gomaa and the Bishop of London in the partner media of the project. The “Arab Spring” prevented the continuation of the C1 Dialogue after 2010.

Within the “Unlearning Intolerance” courses that are conducted jointly by the UN Academic Impact and Media Tenor International for several years these data continue to be presented to a wide public audience, lastly to the UN in New York on December 8, 2014. Without a greater willingness – especially from TV stations - to face media impact data and introduce broader changes towards a more constructive news selection in the line of the Danish DR TV program the terror attack from Paris will not be the last.

For this study Media Tenor International has analysed for the period from January 1 to December 15, 2014 all 509,618 reports about all protagonists described in 20 international TV news stations, out of which 8,359 referred to Muslim protagonists. Average inter-coder reliability amounted to 87.15% in the third quarter of 2014.