Since 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and turmoil in Pakistan, news stories about Muslims, and Islam, both here in Canada and overseas, have multiplied. Often, individuals in Canadian Muslim communities have felt targeted by misrepresentations in some coverage, which would lead other Canadian citizens to regard them as dangerous and detrimental to Canadian society. Media outlets face enormous challenges in untangling the nuances of differences between Muslim groups, and parsing out the religious beliefs from political ideologies and actions.
In an effort to help foster fair, balanced and accurate reporting about Canada’s Muslim communities, the Centre will focus its efforts for the next two years on “The Muslim Project”.
The Centre for Faith and the Media has received a two-year grant from Canadian Heritage – Multiculturalism, to focus on how the media covers Canada’s Muslim communities, and how they are affected by that coverage. The Centre will travel to eight major Canadian cities to conduct media relations training workshops in Muslim communities, and to conduct Roundtable Dialogues hosted by journalism schools to bring together local media, journalism professors and students, with Muslim leaders to discuss the challenges and opportunities of covering Canadian Muslim stories. Issues such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the use of such phrases as Islamic fundamentalist, Islamic extremist, etc. will be on the agenda of the Roundtable Dialogues.
The Centre seeks to help Muslim communities and the media to understand each other better, to have better access to each other, and to foster the kinds of discussions which can facilitate good reporting.
To this end, the Centre will seek to raise awareness within Muslim communities of what freedom of the press means in Canada, and to raise understanding of the constraints of time and resources the media face.
The Centre has embarked upon research using Ipsos-Reid to obtain focus group feedback from Canadian Muslims on their media consumption and concerns. This research will be posted on this website.
In addition, the Centre will develop a comprehensive Media Directory of Canadian Muslim organizations, mosques, schools, key contacts, and other valuable information which will assist the media, as well as the Muslim communities, in recognizing the diverse ethnic and religious perspectives within the Canadian Muslim communities.
We will post the dates of the workshops and Roundtable Dialogues on this website as they become available. The eight cities involved in the project are: Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax.
We are grateful to Canadian Heritage, and the Muslim communities and organizations which have agreed to be supportive of this project.
We are also grateful to the journalism schools and media outlets whose participation and contributions will be vital and critical to the success of “The Muslim Project”.
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