Abstract
When Ross Perigoe began his doctorate at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, he had already spent decades in broadcasting for Canadian public radio and teaching journalism at Concordia University in Montreal. He was interested in the representation of minorities in Canadian news media, and this was to be the broad subject of his PhD. The case study—a discourse analysis of post-9/11 coverage in the (Montreal) Gazette—came to him the evening before meeting his thesis committee on, naturally, September 12, 2001.
I am unclear when Mahmoud Eid, an associate professor in communications at the University of Ottawa, joined the project: Perigoe’s final thesis was accepted in 2005, and he returned to Concordia. He died in 2012, before converting the work into a published monograph, and my guess is that Eid took on the role of midwife, seeing the book through to completion. Eid has focused his scholarly career on representations of Muslims and terrorism, so he was qualified for the job, but it is difficult not to think of Mission Invisible as Perigoe’s project.
What worked as a thesis does not necessarily translate into a successful monograph. 9/11 was still fresh during his studies, and the methodology—a mixture of qualitative and quantitative analysis of news texts—was only starting to surface in scholarly works on Muslims and the media. By 2014, however, more is demanded of a study on these matters, and Mission Invisible does not deliver the goods.
Perigoe and Eid argue that in the weeks immediately following 9/11, the journalists of the Gazette failed to do their job, producing and reproducing racist rhetoric that was socially harmful. They sort their sample of news texts into three periods: Stunned in Grief (11-12 September), Justification for War (13-19 September), and Readying for War (20-30 September). The sources who contribute to these texts are likewise sorted into four categories, including leaders, white victims, Muslims, and journalists. The authors then analyze the rhetoric these sources used in describing Muslims in the news.
This is a slender sample from which to spin a conclusive work. Montreal is a major North American city, but it was peripheral to the events of 9/11. They were nonetheless heavily reported in those first weeks. But the significant question for a study such as this is how the representations developed and what they have meant over time. This book is remarkably ahistorical, as the authors do not examine rhetoric in previous or subsequent crises nor the character of representation in quotidian coverage. They restrict their sample to the pointiest peak of a spike in coverage, reported in one newspaper for a city (within a nation) that was a bystander to the event. With so many years intervening, there was time to do more with this book.
Empirical limitations aside, Perigoe and Eid set a theoretical frame, arguing that a “Muslim”—a religious identification—can be subject to racism. Other scholars have taken this tack, and it can lead to fruitful analysis; but the authors here do not satisfactorily describe what they mean by “racist.” I sense that Perigoe knows racism when he sees it, so freely is the term applied. It is also applied categorically, so that inadequate diversity in hiring practices is, on its own, indicative of “systemic racism” and leads to invocations of “elite voices” and a “dominant White population.” Racism is a central concept for the study and, as a contested term, needs more rigorous definition. Neither do Perigoe and Eid consider alternative interpretations of the texts, let alone the events that underpin them.
Finally, the book suffers from poor organization. Details of the sample—numbers of texts and the delineations of categories—are recorded one third of the way into the book, after the analysis has already begun. Quotations from the sample of news texts (the data) nestle in the same paragraph as scholarly analysis with no delineation between them. “Leaders” and “journalists” are sometimes discussed as “White victims” with no consideration of what this means for the integrity of the categories the authors have created. The construction of “journalists” as a category elides important differences between, for example, reporters and columnists: these differences are acknowledged at the outset but disappear in the empirical chapters, resulting in analysis that is at best naïve and at worst disingenuous.
Perigoe and Eid are at their strongest when they ask probing questions about the Gazette’s consideration of Montreal’s Muslims. The failure of reporters to publish interviews with families who suffered attacks inspired by anti-Muslim sentiment is notable. Even this, however, amounts to stern finger-wagging a dozen years too late, when even the publisher of the newspaper has changed. By restricting their sample to a small time period for one newspaper several years ago, they reduce their ability to answer the “so what” question that gives scholarship its significance. If, as they argue, the coverage of 9/11 was not exceptional but indicative of systematic reporting, they need to provide more data to support this. We may suspect this, but Mission Invisible does not provide sufficient evidence; the deficiencies they record of the Gazette’s coverage and their prescriptions for “better” amount to a matter of opinion. As a scholar likewise engaged in critical study of the media and Muslims, I felt disappointed by the book.