Presenting a 26-page paper titled _“Contemporary Issues in Media and Islam in Nigeria”_ at a one-day post-graduate colloquium, held on Sunday, September 22, 2019 at the Department of Mass Communication, Bayero University, Kano, a media practitioner and author of _Muslims and the Threat of the Media,_ Mallam Rasheed Abubakar said the Nigerian media and their counterpart in the West are usually not fair to Islam as they tend to always portray the adherents of the religion in derogatory manners in their news reports.
Illustrating with examples of front covers from top newspapers in Nigeria and some Western media, the speaker, who is the publisher of a Lagos-based Islamic newspaper, _Muslim News Nigeria,_ established that the unfair treatment and double-standard attitude has come to a point where complying with some Islamic teachings, cultural values and spiritual ideals are passed off by media as symbols of terrorism and religious fanaticism.
He noted that nefarious acts committed by the non-Muslims are not reported as terrorism, extremism or fundamentalism in the media.
According to him, when a white terrorist, Benton Tarrant massacred 50 innocent Muslims, injured another 50 at two mosques in New Zealand, the media didn’t go hard on him. He was described as ‘angelic boy, who grew into an evil far-right mass killer’ according to _Daily Mirror_ of Saturday, March 16, 2019.
“‘Angelic boy…?’ Is that a befitting adjective for a man who just killed 50 people? Why not terrorist?” Abubakar asked, adding that, “To the western media, he was not a terrorist because he is a Caucasian and not an Arabian. He isn’t a Muslim but Christian. He didn’t put on a turban, neither did he grow beard. And he didn’t voice out the takbiraat (Allahu Akbar) while committing his heinous crime. That’s one of the examples of the media double standard.”
Abubakar, who is also a columnist with _Daily INDEPENDENT_ argued that the Fulanis are the most profiled ethnic group that have dominated the news more than ever before, since the coming of President Muhammadu Buhari.
He said, “The Fulanis, mostly Muslims, have dominated the news in the last four years for negative reasons and no thanks to the incessant ‘herdsmen/farmers clashes which have claimed the lives of innocent Nigerians.
Sadly, when it wasn’t a herder attack, the media seem to have the concept ‘fulani herdsmen’ or ‘herdsmen’ a franchise to cover criminality in an asinine attempt to get at the President, who is of Fulani extraction. They tend to criminalise the Fulani and cattle herders with needless generalisation, whereas, not all Fulanis are herders and not all herders are criminals,” he added.
Abubakar, stressed that in an ideal society, crimes of any kind should never be linked with a particular religious, ethnic or geographic entity as he said in his words, “Making pejorative references to a person’s ethnic group is against the ethical conducts for Nigerian journalists. Criminals and fraudsters should be exposed and dealt with individually without linking their evils to their faiths or tribes,” he added.
* First published on September 26, 2019 by _Muslim News Nigeria_ under the headline _”Scholars, researchers gather for IIIT/BUK Colloquium on media research in the Muslim world”._ Follow the link below to read the full story >> https://muslimnews.com.ng/2019/09/26/scholars-researchers-gathered-for-iiit-buk-colloquium-on-media-research-in-the-muslim-world/
Pix: Screenshot from a Nigerian film depicting Fulani as kidnappers
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