US media has good & bad terrorist bias, says NRI-led study

The US newspapers would play down atrocities perpetrated by the Taliban while the same media would report regularly on ISIS-inflicted atrocities, said lead author Abhijit Mazumdar, an assistant professor of journalism at Park University in the US.

Washington: The United States media differentiate between ‘good terrorists’ and ‘bad terrorists’ depending on the country’s foreign policy towards terror groups, research led by a Non-Resident Indian has concluded.

The research titled US Foreign Policy and Indexing Theory: A Study of US Press Coverage of the Taliban and ISIS was published in the latest issue of the International Communication Research Journal.

“We perused hundreds of New York Times and Washington Post articles on ISIS and Taliban over a five-year period from 2014 to 2019,” said lead author Abhijit Mazumdar, an assistant professor of journalism at Park University in the US.

Asserting that the results were startling, Mazumdar said the US newspapers would play down atrocities perpetrated by the Taliban while the same media would report regularly on ISIS-inflicted atrocities.

Both terror groups had the same goal, which was to establish a theocratic Islamic regime in their area of control, he said.

However, the US press would seldom associate religion with the Taliban even as it sought to associate Islam with ISIS, he added.

“We concluded that the US press was supporting the US government’s foreign policy on Taliban and ISIS where the US authorities were negotiating a smooth handover of Afghanistan to Taliban while they were fighting to eliminate ISIS in the Middle East,” Mazumdar said.

Going soft on the Taliban made sense for the US press to support their government, the researcher added.

There were several significant findings in the research.

“Surprisingly, a vast majority of the news stories related Al Qaeda with ISIS and not Taliban,” Mazumdar said. Similarly, significantly more news stories talked about the Taliban administration in Afghanistan, while the US press did not report much about the ISIS administration in the Middle East.

“We concluded that the US media wanted to give a semblance of statehood to the Taliban with whom the US was negotiating a transfer of power while denying the same news coverage to ISIS,” he added.

ISIS recruitment strategies regularly found their way into the news simply because they were attracting US citizens.

However, the US press did not pay much attention to the Taliban’s recruitment efforts because they were not recruiting US citizens, Mazumdar said.

Overall, the researchers concluded that the US media supports the foreign policy of the US government, which may not bode well for press freedom.