Project for Excellence in Journalism

Blogs Debate New York Mosque

August 26, 2010

For the second week in a row, the debate over a planned mosque near the World Trade Center site raged in the blogosphere. But this time, a different set of voices dominated the conversation.

From Aug. 16-20, 14% of the news links on blogs were about the mosque controversy, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

One week earlier, the same topic was the second biggest story in the blogosphere (18% of the links), in that case, the commentary was dominated by anti-mosque voices.

But last week, bloggers in support of the planned mosque rose up. Most responded to a column by Charles Krauthammer who argued that the center should be located elsewhere for "reasons of common decency and respect for the sacred." These bloggers disagreed and felt cultural sensitivity is trumped by the legal right of Muslims.

"Rights are not symbolic abstractions," wrote Maha on Mahablog. "A right that cannot be exercised is not a right. Krauthammer and others on the Right keep saying they don't dispute the right to build the Islamic Center on private property, but are saying the Center shouldn't be built."

An anonymous blogger on MyBrainItches seconded that sentiment "We allow you the right to practice your religion and will allow it to you under the laws of our land. That's who we are and we need to show a higher class of citizenship."

Other bloggers attacked the underlying premise of Krauthammer's article: that the cultural center would be too close to Ground Zero for comfort.

"Those Americans who oppose the plans to build an Islamic community center at 45-51 Park Place seem to tie all Muslims to the September 11th attacks," Hector Luis Alamo, Jr. wrote at Young Observers. "Their fear and misunderstanding of the issue was exemplified by the columnist for The Washington Post Charles Krauthammer when he likened the proposal of an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan to a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor, a German cultural center at Treblinka, or even a "commercial tower over Gettysburg."

One of the few anti-mosque bloggers who commented last week questioned the wisdom of protecting all types of religious establishment under the law.

"Under the First Amendment defense, should not more radical Islamic views be protected as well?" Brian Castner wrote on the Buffalo Repat blog at WNYmedia.net. "I don't even mean Al Qaeda, or a front for Hamas providing materiel support (both illegal). I just mean the occasional fiery speech supporting strict Sharia law. Where is the line? If less than moderate Muslims preaching at this site gives you pause, then we are not so far apart."

The mosque debate also resonated on YouTube last week where the third most viewed video featured MSNBC host Keith Olbermann arguing for keeping the project near Ground Zero.

And it topped the mainstream news agenda last week as well, accounting for 15% of the newshole in PEJ's News Coverage Index from August 16-22. On the ideological and debate-oriented cable and talk radio programs, it filled a striking 45% of the airtime studied. The commentary on these programs, though, was more mixed on both sides of the controversy.

One area of similarity between the social and mainstream media was an analysis of the semantics of the dispute. Some of the newspaper and network news reporting, in particular, was devoted to examining the mosque's proximity to the World Trade Center site and questioning whether the term "Ground Zero mosque" was accurate. That was also a thread picked up by a significant number of bloggers last week. Hector Luis Alamo declared, for instance, "Bigotry and Islamophobia are bolstering the opposition to the planned Park51 center, misleading described as the "Ground Zero mosque" by much of the media."

Tied for the No. 2 spot on blogs (13% of the links) was a poll about President Obama's religious orientation by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life. Taken before President Obama's Aug. 15 comments endorsing religious freedom -- the poll found the percentage of Americans who think Obama is a Muslim had grown to 18%, up from 11% in March 2009.

On Twitter last week an article sounding the death knell for the World Wide Web generated the most attention by far.

Continue reading the full report at journalism.org.

_{*For the sake of authenticity, PEJ has a policy of not correcting misspellings or grammatical errors that appear in direct quotes from blog postings.}