How do American newsmedia portray Canadian Muslims? Using a sample of 386 discrete newspaper articles published between January 1, 1999 and December 31, 2014 in Buffalo News, Tampa Bay Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today, this paper investigates the portrayal of Canadian Muslims in these publications through a combination of content and discourse analyses. Three findings stand out: first, the overall tone of the coverage was neutral or ambiguous rather than either systematically positive or systematically negative. Second, a tendency to construct Muslims as social outsiders was common even in articles coded as positive. Third, the Canadian Muslim experience was viewed through the distorting prism of discourses on American exceptionalism, and especially the idea that assimilation always trumps multiculturalism.
