“The Australian media’s coverage of Muslims and Arabs is tainted with a racism that portrays them as “tricky, sleazy, sexual and untrustworthy”, according to one of the country’s most experienced journalists.
Muslims are portrayed as uniformly violent, oppressors of women, and members of a global conspiracy opposed to Australian values, said Peter Manning, former head of ABC News, now Adjunct Professor of Journalism at Sydney’s University of Technology. He said that the words “Arab” or “Muslim” were associated with terrorism in 89 per cent of articles that appeared in Sydney’s two major newspapers in the year after September 11, 2001.
He did not confine his criticism to the media, however, adding that it was time politicians stopped “stoking up the embers of racist hatred”.”
The Age