Priscilla Lewis and Sue Veres Royal, US in the World

The feature article in last weekend's New York Times magazine was The Jihadist Next Door (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html).  It's a lengthy portrait of Omar Hammami, "a popular kid from a small town in Alabama" who "became a key figure in one of the world's most ruthless Islamist insurgencies," the Somalia-based Shabab.  For US in the World, this article offered some important lessons about framing effects - and about how the framing of a particular story interacts with overarching media narratives about terrorism.  Here are a couple of observations...

1.  Visuals are part of framing. Words and images together help determine which big ideas begin to organize people's thinking about an issue - and in this article, the combination tends to reinforce familiar, fear-inducing stereotypes. The NYT article prominently displays full-page photographs of Hammami that are taken from a Shabab propaganda video.  In these images, Hammami's intense, bearded face and his attire - not to mention the gun he holds in one photograph - conform to a familiar media stereotype of "the terrorist."  Lest anyone miss the point, these photographs are printed against a blood-red background.  On the magazine's cover, the title of the article is superimposed in large type onto one of these stereotypical images, a visual that invites readers to understand "jihadists next door" as a frighteningly general problem.  Inside the magazine, the article opens with a two-page spread that juxtaposes a blue-tinted photograph of Hammami as a smiling, tee-shirted teenager with one of those red images of Hammami, the Shabab fighter. The first words of the article's title, "The Jihadist," are superimposed over the apparently normal teenager's picture - a contrast that might stimulate anxiety about what's going on "inside" other young Muslim or Arab Americans - while the remaining words of the title, "Next Door," appear over the terrorist's image, confirming the message of the magazine's cover and again evoking the scenario of fearsome enemies infiltrating our homes and communities.

Such imagery fosters outsized fears and lays the groundwork for dangerous overreaction - especially because it reinforces and draws strength from stereotypes of Muslims and Arabs that are already pervasive in the news and entertainment media (see Jack Shaheen's book and website, Reel Bad Arabs, at www.reelbadarabs.com).  The vast majority of media references to Islam and Muslims occur in the context of terrorism, a context that now includes a problematic new narrative about "homegrown terrorism." While the author of this NYT magazine article clearly intends to tell a more nuanced story, the title and visuals together stimulate default assumptions that are likely to make it difficult for some readers to take in such a story.

2.  If communicators don't provide a compelling and commonsense alternative story, the dominant narrative will tend to shape audiences' thinking. Unfortunately, today's dominant narrative about "terrorism" is intrinsically linked to a narrative about the religion of Islam; "terrorists" today are, almost by definition, Muslim.  The Jihadist Next Door hints at but fails to develop important story lines that might have helped readers to understand Hammadi's transformation in some way other than being "about" his religious beliefs - and to understand Islam in some way other than being "about" violent jihad.

• For example, we read that two of Hammami's friends who also embraced a Salifist interpretation of Islam never even considered turning to violence and eventually left the Salafi movement. Why? Doesn't this suggest that something other than religious fundamentalism was at work? The article does not pursue these questions.

• We read that by the time Hammami was a junior in high school, his behavior had become dangerously aggressive - to the point of trying to choke another student. Yet other than suspending (not expelling) this obviously disturbed young man, no efforts seem to have been made by the school or his parents to intervene. Here is another alternative story line - about a person who suffers from severe social and psychological problems - that is familiar from investigations into school shootings as well as the shootings at Fort Hood, yet has not been developed in the Times article.

• We get glimpses of a dysfunctional family, including a sister who remains close to Omar but apparently has not tried in any serious way to dissuade him from his abhorrent behavior. Rather than pursuing this story line or even challenging Omar's mother, father, and sister to reflect more deeply, the article depicts a baffled family, helplessly observing an inexorable process that seems beyond control or intervention, and in which they play no part.

• Finally, for an article that deals with such a topical issue, this piece is remarkably devoid of commentary from experts on terrorism who might have put the story in a larger context. Such experts could have given readers some sense of what's been learned about the pathways to violent extremism (and the relatively small role that religiosity seems to play) as well as about strategies for countering the appeal of membership in "brotherhoods" of violence. The only reference to experts here describes them as mystified, "scrambling" to make sense of a new phenomenon.

In short, the absence of alternative story lines leaves readers to fall back on the dominant narrative about Islam and violence.  And indeed, many of the readers' comments on the NYT website make this connection or posit some other linkage that involves religious belief.

The Jihadist Next Door is a well-told human interest story, and we shouldn't expect the media to forego such narratives.  But one thing we do know from the scientific study of risk perception (see Daniel Gardner, The Science of Risk) is that dramatic stories, widely shared, are perceived as more typical than they actually are.  Whether the focus is on school shootings or child abductions by strangers or "homegrown terrorism," stories about rare events that rise to the top of the media agenda are likely to be interpreted as cautionary tales about common threats.  In this case, a different title, a broader perspective, stronger reminders that other outcomes and explanations are possible, a decision to refrain from using certain images - all these things might have made a difference, even within the parameters of the human interest genre.

What do you think?  And what is the role of advocates in this situation?