They will hate us for this: effects of media coverage on Islamist terror attacks on Muslims’ perceptions of public opinion, perceived risk of victimization, and behavioral intentions

Abstract

While research has intensively studied the effects of media coverage of Islamist terror on non-Muslims, our knowledge about how it affects Muslims themselves is still limited. Following Sikorski et al. (2017), we distinguish between undifferentiated and differentiated news on Islamist terror, i.e., news reports that explicitly establish or deny a link between Muslims or Islam and Islamist terror. In a 1 × 4 randomized experiment, we exposed N = 423 German Muslims to four different news conditions (terror differentiated, terror undifferentiated, criminal act, and a control group). Our results show that Muslims infer a negative picture of public opinion toward their group from news articles about Islamist terror, with stronger effects for undifferentiated depictions. Moreover, this notion leads to an increased perceived risk for the ingroup to fall victim to xenophobic violence. A strong German national identity attenuated the effects, whereas Muslim identity had no moderating effect.