The present study critically investigates the single case media reporting of the
Chapel Hill shooting incident in North Carolina, USA. Eight newspaper reports,
including BBC, Fox News, Independent, The Telegraph, The New York Times,
Huffington Post, and among which two from CNN were assessed, using the Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach. At the explanation level, a social analysis
was conducted to the order of discourse, which was connected to a specific
social order to produce the final texts of the report. The findings of the study
revealed that the reports were not objective. They were found to be linguistically
biased as the incident was portrayed as an un-Islamophobic crime. These results
also confirmed the revelations in other studies regarding the representation of
Muslims by the Western media and the ‘elite racism’ ideology, which was followed
in the production of reports.