U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Arab Americans Pre- and Post-9/11

The findings of the study show that deviance does play some role in the news coverage of Arab- Americans, but the role is not as strong as theory would predict. Contrary to the prediction by the theories of influence on mass media content by Shoemaker and Reese, the study found that an increase in the U.S. public’s perceived deviance of Arab-Americans was not correlated with increased stereotyping of them by eight major metro newspapers in the five years that followed the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The findings also provided only moderate support to the hypothesis that the more deviant the U.S. public perceives Arab-Americans the more coverage they will receive by the news media – also an argument of the Shoemaker and Reese theory. The study also found that although there was an increase in coverage of Arab-Americans after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 - as the Shoemaker and Reese theory predicted – that increase declined in the following years. The findings also show that the majority of the coverage of Arab-Americans remained balanced in tone in the five years after 9/11.