The Framing of Islam and Muslims in the Tenth Anniversary Coverage of 9/11: Implications for Reconciliation and Moving On

Abstract

This article analyses Australian television news programmes' framing of the tenth anniversary of the events of 9/11. Our findings build on and reaffirm the earlier work we did in this area-showing that television news programmes in Australia have moved away from conflating terrorism with Muslims and Islam. We found that the tenth anniversary coverage was presented with the frames of "reconciliation" and "moving on" from 9/11. The dominant frame used by Australian television news was based on the US-Australia relations, including a shared worldview, common experiences of lives lost in the attacks and a unified response in the context of the "war on terror". Notably absent from the coverage was the attribution of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks to Muslim communities. Rather, references to Muslim minority communities tended to focus on bridge-building and reconciliation