A few weeks ago, I was planning on comparing the way that CNN, FOX, and MSNBC were covering the recent burqa ban in France when I found something odd. Aside from a two minute feature from CNN, there was very little original coverage from any of these organizations. While they ran Associated Press stories, they didn't report or write anything original themselves.
Intrigued, I decided to look at what kind of coverage these stations were giving issues involving women and Islam. I looked over five or six articles from all three places, and tried to rate the coverage by content as well as how difficult the search engines were to us.
This is what I found.
CNN:
Content Quality: A-
Content Quantity: B
Search Engine D-
CNN had by far the most extensive original coverage of Muslim women, though I had to scroll through pages and pages of AP stories to find it. One article that I liked in particular had Muslim women explaining their choice to wear a burqa, something I haven't seen much of elsewhere in the media.
Another story CNN ran featured a slides how and a story about a company that designs fashionable headscarves in Belgium. While it's a fun article and has great visuals, I would have liked to know if there was any controversy over the origin and nature of these designs. Whether or not this is a problem I do not know, but I would have liked to see it addressed one way or the other.
As far as the opinion section, there was a fantastic piece by Fatemeh Fakhrai, who runs a blog about how the media portrays Muslims. In the piece, she discussed how the media is obsessed with the way that Muslim woman look. It was easily the best written opinion piece of any I came across on any of the three sites.
FOX
Content Quality: B
Content Quantity: D
Search Engine: F
I ran into the same problem FOX as I did with CNN, scrolling through over ten pages of content before I located the first original stories dealing with Islam and women. While the actual articles I did find were of good quality, there were very few of them.
One of the first articles I came across discussed a controversy raised by Muslim women sitting behind President. While it wasn't just about Muslim women per se, it was an interesting well written article about the process of creating a crowd of people at a presidential speech. Though it could have probed further into the issues.
A second article was an expose about Muslim women in America and domestic abuse. Interviewing Muslim women about such a sensitive topic is probably no easy task, so I applause them for finding these women to talk to. However, its statistics about domestic abuse were mostly taken from an advoacy group. While I know these numbers were hard to obtain because of the low rate of being reported (which the article acknowledged), relying on an advocacy group for numbers isn't always a great practice in general. Overall, it was well written and well reported.
I fond only two editorials discussion issues involving Muslim women. One, a blog entry about high profile women in Britain was interesting, but written so poorly it made me wonder where the editors were. The other an opinion piece about the burqa ban, was well written and researched. So they kind of canceled each other out quality wise.
MSNBC
Content Quality: C
Content Quantity: F
Search Engine: ?
MSNBC was the one news station that surprised me by having incredibly disappointing results. Whether or not this is the fault of the search engine, is debatable. I could only come up with two non-AP stories involving Muslim women. With the AP stories, it brought this to a whopping total of five.
One was a brief article of controversy involving the Muslim women who worked at Disney. It was pitifully short, only have a page, and opened with a quote from the Chicago tribune which I find disturbing.
The other discussed Muslim women and finance. Overall the reporting, writing, and ideas were good. However, that doesn't change the fact that the list of articles is very surprisingly short. Once again, I'm not sure if this was a problem related to the search engine.
Conclusion:
It seems to me that stories covering the issues of Muslim women is few and far between. I would have to agree with something Fakhrai's said in her opinion piece on CNN. I would love to see more the media strive write articles that find out these women really are and what is important to them.
If the media can't do that for the people of the world, what is the point of having it to begin with?
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