Islamophobia is on the rise in the United States. According to a study from the Brookings Institute, unfavorable attitudes towards Islam have increased by 14% in the last decade. Considering the fact that there are 3.3 million Muslims living in the U.S, the increasing rate of Islamophobia in the U.S. is extremely problematic, and has already had drastic consequences for Muslim Americans. Since 9/11, Muslim Americans have experienced discrimination and unconstitutional surveillance, which has led them to experience higher levels of depression than any other minority group.
These fears about Muslims are not rooted in fact; only a small number of terrorist attacks in the U.S. are committed by Muslims. Muslims have instead helped prevent more than one-third of Al Qaeda terrorist plots in the U.S.
A study by the Public Religion Research suggests that the negative attitudes towards Muslims stem from sensationalist news headlines, rather than personal experiences. This phenomenon became especially obvious with the media coverage of the War in Iraq, where pro-war reporting was six times more likely than anti-war messages, which led 79% of Americans to support the invasion (never mind the fact that the CIA later reported that no weapons of mass-destruction had been found). Unfortunately, this “misinformation effect” had severe ethical consequences, with thousands of American and a million Iraqi lost lives.
The prevailing crisis in mainstream journalism, as evidenced by the pro-war reporting leading up to the War in Iraq, coupled with the growth of social media usage, highlight the importance of implementing a Critical Media Literacy (CML) curriculum at U.S. higher education institutions. CML aim to aid students and faculty to “analyze how media industries reproduce sociocultural structures of power by determining who gets to tell the stories of a society, what points of view and organizational interests will shape the construction of these stories, and who the target audience is.” A study found that Canada, England and Australia have already adopted critical media courses as part of public education, while the U.S. seems to be lacking 35 years behind these policy solutions.
The Global Critical Media Literacy Project (GCLMP), which looks at sociocultural structures of media, who gets to tell stories, and who the target audience is, would be a good place for American higher education institutions to start. Its pedagogy is already being taught at select colleges in the U.S. Using this as a model, CUNY could develop a course in Critical Media Literacy, which could be implemented as part of the Required Core Curriculum at the City University of New York. Considering the ethical importance of the matter, this is something to be considered and approved of by the Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost and developed by the Common Core Course Review Committee (CCCRC), who oversees the current Common Core Pathway.
CUNY could serve as a pioneer and inspiration for other institutions in the U.S. This is a bottom-up strategy that could aid in not only creating a more informed, ethical society; it could also help build a stronger democracy by helping to shift the current Islamophobic narrative.
