We thank Elisabeth Ivarsflaten and Paul Sniderman for their thoughtful review of our book. Here we elaborate on a few key questions they raise. First, our main corpus covers 1996–2016 and thus excludes the Trump presidency. Ivarsflaten and Sniderman wonder about the impact of a political leader who trades in explicitly Islamophobic rhetoric. Our expectation is that the effect would be marginal. After all, most newspaper coverage of Muslims is not directly related to the statements of political leaders, even extreme ones. Moreover, there had already been a steady drumbeat of Islamophobic rhetoric from the political right for many years; Trump’s own statements likely added negativity only through direct reporting of those statements, which represents only a small fraction of all coverage of Muslims.

This raises the broader question of the source of the overall negative image of Muslims in the American public discourse. Our findings may be driven in part by a relatively recent—post-Cold War—construction of Muslims as an existential enemy. Yet, as Edward Said argued forty years ago, coverage of Muslims was already very negative in the 1970s and 1980s. An important contribution of our analysis is to show that negativity is not the only measure that matters. There are major differences between the earlier and contemporary eras in the volume of coverage as well as the linkage between Muslims and terrorism in the press; in our book we pinpoint a spike in both after 9/11. Ivarsflaten and Sniderman may be right that there was a previous jump prior to 1996, where our data start, either just after the end of the Cold War, or perhaps as far back as the Iranian Revolution. Identifying how far back these consequential patterns go is a promising avenue for further research.

A third question raised by Ivarsflaten and Sniderman links the findings of our two books. As they show, public opinion about Muslims is quite variegated. Given what we know about the impact of the media on public opinion formation, how can we reconcile this with the long-standing pattern of systematically negative media coverage we identify? This is a question of great importance that deserves a thorough analysis; here we offer some initial thoughts. First, most newspaper coverage focuses on foreign Muslims, who receive more negative coverage than do domestic Muslims. That matches Ivarsflaten and Sniderman’s findings that publics are more suspicious of Muslims viewed as having a stronger connection to a foreign country. Second, we have shown in experimental work (Erich Bleich, Jeffrey Carpenter, and A. Maurits van der Veen, “Assessing the Effect of Media Tone on Attitudes Toward Muslims: Evidence from an Online Experiment,” Politics and Religion, 2022) that the impact on attitudes of negative media coverage is mediated by individual-level variables such as anxiety. More research is required to identify the mediators and moderators that influence the relationship between negative media coverage and long-term attitudes and deeply held beliefs. Third, and relatedly, the media are only one source of information about other groups; when individuals learn about Muslims primarily through personal contact, the impact of media coverage may be attenuated

Juxtaposing the findings of our two books leads to a host of compelling research questions. We look forward to further research that enriches our understanding of the interactions between media coverage and public attitudes toward Muslims and other marginalized groups.