Reading racism in post-9/11 Gazette
This year’s annual Lecture on Diversity and Canadian Media featured Concordia associate journalism professor Ross Perigoe’s presentation about his doctoral thesis, “Racism after 9/11: The Gazette Newspaper and the Montreal Muslim Community.”
The event included reaction from Andrew Phillips, editor in chief of the Montreal Gazette, Lorna Roth, former chair of the Communication Studies Department, Rachad Antonius, deputy director of the Research Centre on Immigration, Ethnicity and Citizenship from the Université du Québec à Montréal, and Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal.
Perigoe’s paper focused on the content of The Gazette for 20 days after Sept. 11, 2001. Almost 275,000 words were analyzed in 362 articles, in which Perigoe claimed to have found more than 1,000 racist comments directed at the Muslim community.
Perigoe mentioned the special relationship Concordia University has with The Gazette, producing journalists for them and emphasized his high regard for Montreal’s English daily newspaper.
However, “9/11 was viewed as a white story, not a Muslim story,” he told his audience of about 25 at the Novotel Hotel. “It was viewed in terms of how do we, as whites, cope.”
He applied critical discourse analysis to his sample. “Who gets to speak, about what and where, gives great insight into the production of racism,” he said.
Elmenyawi said “newspapers in Canada participated in the framing of the conflict between civilizations. They did this by accusing Canada for its immigration system for letting the hijackers get into the United States through Canada. To be sure, they were hardly alone in this. It was a time where Muslims in Canada were surrounded by angry white communities.”
Perigoe said that as well as using quotations containing racist remarks, some journalists generating racist comments themselves during the 20 days after 9/11. “The language was more thoughtless than deliberate,” he said.
Andrew Phillips, who was not at The Gazette during the period covered by Perigoe’s study, responded that The Gazette and other outlets “repeatedly warned against any temptation to blame Muslims in general and especially Muslims in Montreal”.
“We carried articles quoting religious leaders of all faiths, calling for calm, [articles] about schools making sure Muslims students were safe and about people from all communities standing together at various ceremonies and events,” Phillips said.
Antonius picked up on the conflation of what he distinguished between racism and racist discourse, “There is a whole range of context to analyse the shades of the discourse, but you simply counted the number of racist remarks and concluded that the paper was racist.”
Addressing the issue of diversity in newsrooms, Phillips agreed that The Gazette should hire more news staff from visible minorities. Perigoe said Concordia should also recruit more visible-minority employees for its Journalism Department. Roth would go beyond that, and implement awareness and training programs for journalists from all backgrounds.
For more information on the Centre for Research Action on Race Relations, visit www.media-awareness.ca.