Adam Serwer

Two-thirds of viewers who say Fox News is the news source they trust most believe discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups, according to a study released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research Institute. The number, 68 percent, is an exact reversal of the percentage of black people in the same poll who say that discrimination against whites is not as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. The study was based on polling conducted by PRRI.*

The Brookings/PRRI study uses "reverse discrimination"—an unfortunate term that suggests a difference in kind, not in degree—to describe anti-white discrimination. Nevertheless, the revelations about the views of consumers who most trust Fox News are disturbing:

Among Americans who say they most trust Fox News, 26 percent say reverse discrimination is a critical issue, nearly twice as many as say discrimination against minority groups is a critical issue (14 percent). At the other end of the spectrum, only 8 percent of Americans who most trust public television say reverse discrimination is a critical issue, compared to 27 percent who say discrimination against minorities is a critical issue.

The financial crisis wiped out 20 years of minority wealth gains, and minority incarceration and unemployment rates are far higher than those of whites, but white Americans have nevertheless become more receptive to the idea that whites face as much discrimination as minorities. While the numbers for those who trust Fox News are much higher, a majority of whites in the study, 51 percent, also say they believe discrimination against whites is as big of a problem as discrimination against minorities. That's despite relatively low levels of interaction between whites and minorities. According to the study, "More than 8-in-10 Americans report having a conversation with an African-American person at least once a day (43 percent) or occasionally (40 percent)." Most of these exchanges, apparently, involve black people callously turning down whites applying for jobs or home loans. Nevertheless, while opinions of Muslims and immigrants vary by age and political perspective, demographic groups surveyed expressed positive impressions of African Americans across the board. (Otherwise, they might be racist or something.)

When it comes to Muslims, the study shows that the funders of the more than $40 million Shariah panic industry are getting their money's worth. Although two-thirds of Americans say that Muslims are not trying to establish Shariah law in the US, "[o]ver the last 8 months agreement with this question has increased by 7 points, from 23 percent in February 2011 to 30 percent today." The number of Republicans who buy that Muslims are trying to establish Shariah law in the US is up 14 points since August 2011, from 31 percent to 45 percent. 

Fox News is a crucial outlet for fomenting Shariah panic. According to the study, "There is a strong correlation between trusting Fox News and negative views of Islam and Muslims," as "[n]early 6-in-10 Republicans who most trust Fox News believe that American Muslims are trying to establish Shari'a law in the U.S.," and 72 percent of "Fox News Republicans" agree that Islam is "at odds with American values." If you're a Republican, you're more likely to think that white people are as discriminated against as minorities and that American Muslims represent a fifth column trying to subvert the Constitution. But if you're a Republican who watches Fox News, then you're far more likely to believe those things, thanks to a steady media diet of racial resentment and Muslim-baiting paranoia.

*Updated to reflect the fact that the poll was done by PRRI, and that the study was a joint venture.

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Last week Jen Quraishi wrote an excellent summary of Pew's latest study on American Muslims, aptly titled "Report: Muslim Americans Are Incredibly Normal." The Washington Times did a largely straight write-up of the study, except for this paragraph:

When asked to choose, nearly half of Muslims in the U.S. say they think of themselves first as Muslim, rather than as American. Roughly 60 percent say that most Muslims come to the U.S. to adopt the American way of life and see no conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.

Nearly half of American Muslims think of themselves as Muslims first! Sounds sinister—until you consider that description applies to "nearly half" of American Christians as well, with the percentage of Muslims identifying themselves by religion before nationality (49 percent) being only three points higher than the number of American Christians who say the same (46 percent).

The Times writeup also flags an interesting statistic from the Pew report I haven't seen highlighted elsewhere: a plurality of Muslim Americans, 43 percent, now see American efforts to combat terrorism as "sincere," up from 26 percent in 2007. That's in spite of the Obama administration's aggressive FBI sting operations, its asserting the authority to kill Americans suspected of terrorism abroad, its failure to close Guantanamo and the perpetuation of a litany of Bush-era national security policies. When it comes to drone strikes or escalating troop levels in Afghanistan, Obama has actually out-hawked his predecessor. 

Despite all that, Muslim Americans like and trust Obama more than they trusted Bush, with 76 percent approving of the president's record. Obama's effort to "reset" U.S. relations with Muslims abroad doesn't appear to have worked. At home, though, Obama's outreach seems to be working pretty well. That's despite the fact that, as the Washington Post reported Tuesday, Obama has avoided certain personal public gestures that his predecessor willingly made (like visiting a mosque, for example).

I can't help but wonder if part of the difference has to do with the persistent conspiracy theories about the president being a secret Muslim—on some level, obviously, the president gets what it's like to be singled out for being "different." But perhaps it's also that Obama's gestures of tolerance, such as his support for the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, represent much more of a political risk for him than they did for Bush. Or it might just be that Democrats, the Dubai Ports World fiasco aside, never completely succumbed to the kind of anti-Muslim rhetoric common in the Republican Party today. The bigger difference may simply be that in the age of full-blown Sharia panic, the contrast between the president and the opposition makes Obama's inclusive rhetoric all the more meaningful.

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