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“Muslim Candidate Plays Defense,” read the headline in the Washington Post. “Democrat Poised to Become First Muslim in Congress,” said the New York Times. “Minnesotan Poised to Be Congress’ First Muslim,” declared the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe agreed: “Muslim could be a 1st in Congress.”
Keith Ellison is set to make history on Tuesday, and the national press cannot get enough of the 43-year-old frontrunner from Minnesota’s overwhelmingly Democratic 5th District — a highly intriguing candidate who is a two-term state legislator, lawyer, father of four, and most importantly, it seems, a convert to Islam.
“I’m a Muslim. I’m proud to be a Muslim. But I’m not running as a Muslim candidate,” Ellison, a Detroit native, told the Post. “The people of the 5th Congressional District didn’t seem nearly as concerned about [my religion] as our friends in the press,” Ellison told NPR Sept. 13, just after he won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor primary with a convincing 41 percent of the vote in a district that encompasses north Minneapolis and nearby suburbs. On CNN’s The Situation Room that same day, Bill Schneider reported that “Ellison gave me every indication he intends to be a progressive voice. Not primarily a racial or a religious voice.” In the interview that followed, host Wolf Blitzer found it hard to believe that Ellison would be both the first Muslim elected to Congress and the first African-American congressman from Minnesota, asking “What’s a bigger thrill for you in terms of that element of making history?” Replied Ellison: “You know, it’s all mixed up together. Wolf, I mean, again. I haven’t put the emphasis on my own personal identity.”
But though Ellison keeps making that clear — the subject of his groundbreaking status due to his religion, he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, is “not that interesting” — that is just the story the national press keeps reporting. And reporting. And reporting.
“It’s almost this too-neat of a little box that he’s getting put in,” says Christopher Gilbert, a professor of political science at Minnesota’s Gustavus Adolphus College, who draws a parallel to news coverage from the so-called Year of the Woman in 1992, when voters elected four new women senators, bringing their total to six. “It’s a bit of a bind. There’s an assumption that because they are a member of a historically underrepresented group that they stand for all the ideals of that group.”
The implication — that those senators then and Ellison now would represent women and Muslims, respectively, as “their core purpose of being in office” — illustrates a big difference from the assumptions made for traditional white male politicians, Gilbert says.
The Ellison coverage is a case of “priming of the news,” says Agha Saeed, chair of the American Muslim Taskforce, in which the mainstream media has reinserted his religion into an electoral process that should be secular, thus defining him by that issue.
“He is not wearing his religion on his sleeve, but the media has been putting it back on his sleeve,” Saeed says of Ellison, attributing this in part to the seeming appeal of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” framework and to “a post-9/11 obsession with Islam and Muslims.”
To be sure, Ellison’s campaign has tried to force journalists to drop the one-dimensional frame.
“The press latch on to whatever they feel is the newest, most different, in some cases quote-unquote most sensational part of a story, and, you know, it is of note that Representative Ellison would be the first Muslim congressman,” explains Bridget Cusick, Ellison’s spokeswoman. “What we have done to try to expand the story a bit is, when most of these people come into town, we say ‘Great, you can talk to Keith tonight if you come to his town hall forum on education,’ on health care, whatever.”
Nevertheless, Keith Ellison has been defined by the national press as the prospective first Muslim in Congress, period.
This is not surprising, given the first-of-a-kind news peg that Ellison can’t shake; that U.S. foreign policy has for five years now been driven by the attacks of 9/11, with the country engaged in a nebulous war on terror against, primarily, Islamic extremists; and that during that time Islam consequently has been very much in the news. And as the New York Times argued, Ellison’s “candidacy has amounted to something of a political awakening among Muslims tired of being vilified since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,” at least among Minneapolis’ Somali Muslim community, whose unprecedented turnout helped Ellison win the primary. Hussein Samatar, a Somali native who is the founder and director of the African Development Center of Minnesota, says of Ellison’s first-Muslim role: “It’s history, so there’s no question about it. And I’m sure the media has gravitated toward that, and they should.”
Janaan Hashim, a Tuesday night host of Radio Islam, says that 9/11 was “a big catalyst” in integrating Muslims into American political life: “The political wheels were starting to turn [beforehand], but this really put it into fifth gear, and got us going and got us focused.”
While she says “it’s ridiculous that any minority group has to go through this rite of passage to prove themselves,” as with Ellison, she also concisely sums up the press’s attraction to the story: “It’s a newsworthy item, it’s unique. Other people, other groups have gotten into the circle, but not Muslims yet. And I think that’s the unique angle for a journalist.”
But the narrow focus of the headlines belies something else: that all the press attention has come without much imagination. “Keith Ellison, possible 1st Muslim in Congress, alleges blackmail,” read the headline on this Oct. 19 Associated Press story reporting on an he said/she said tussle over an alleged extramarital relationship, as the AP hardly explained why Ellison’s faith was relevant to its story. Meantime, of the many stories we examined from September and October, only the London Sunday Telegraph and Reuters quoted the imam of Ellison’s north Minneapolis mosque, who did not return CJR Daily’s calls. And for all the talk of his faith, the St. Petersburg Times was a rare outlet that actually thought to mention what kind of Muslim Ellison is — “a moderate Sunni.”
The four big-name pieces referenced at the top of this article did not do that, giving only a surface treatment of Islam. The Post did note that Ellison “prays toward Mecca five times a day and says he has not eaten pork or had a drink of alcohol since he converted to Islam as a 19-year-old student at Wayne State University in Detroit,” and that his attraction to Islam was partially “a reaction against status quo politics,” but the paper was otherwise focused on political controversy. The two Times went with the political awakening angle, with the New York Times quoting this comment from Ellison on his conversion from Catholicism: “I don’t remember any grand epiphany. I saw no vision, no lightning on the road to Damascus.” (The paper also concisely reported Ellison’s “progressive positions,” which include “support for universal health coverage, raising the minimum wage and withdrawing the troops from Iraq.”) And the Globe focused on the symbolism of Ellison’s first-Muslim status, with Ellison saying that while he is proud to be a Muslim American, “when I walk out the door I’m not thinking about my religious identity. I’m thinking about what my neighbors need.”
What these four stories missed, at a time when so much of the coverage of Islam is tainted by terrorism and extremism, was a good opportunity to explain and demystify the religion further. Some might argue such explanatory reporting is no longer necessary, but with 39 percent of Americans telling an August USA Today/Gallup Poll that “they felt at least some prejudice against Muslims” and 22 percent saying “they wouldn’t want Muslims as neighbors,” we think it is.
Fortunately for Ellison, his special status has not played as large in the Minnesota political press.
“Ellison got a lot of scrutiny, particularly in the primary,” says Larry Jacobs, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, referring to “machine-gun stories” about a number of Ellison’s personal failures, such as late income tax filings and unpaid parking tickets.
“There was smoke there,” Jacobs says. “There was a reason why the press took a really close look at Keith Ellison, and I think that the Twin Cities media has largely done a pretty good job of following the story.”
Indeed, the Bigfoot of Minnesota’s media scene, the Star Tribune, has produced consistently solid coverage that has, not surprisingly, addressed a broader range of issues than the stories of parachute journalists.
Two stories in particular gave a fuller picture of who Keith Ellison, prospective congressman, actually is. The first, from early September, described Ellison as a passionate speaker who “often jumps to his feet in debates, jabbing the air with a finger to make a point.” Said Ellison: “I am going to speak up for peace. I’m going to speak up and be able to challenge the drug companies and pharmaceutical companies and demand economic justice for people, the union movement and the right to organize.” The story said that Ellison, who worked as a public defender, was drawn to the law “out of a desire to see that ‘vulnerable people, poor people, politically unpopular people have a fair shake.'” Besides noting some fun facts (Ellison’s comfort food is bananas), the Strib also got Ellison to declare that his problems were behind him: “I will have my act tight. I have learned the lesson of making sure my personal affairs are in order so I can stay focused on the people’s business.”
The second piece, a mid-October Star Tribune profile, rehashed many of the controversies, religious or otherwise, that have hampered Ellison’s campaign this year. They included his past ties to the Nation of Islam — he helped organize the Million Man March, and has “told Jewish groups he regretted not reacting more quickly to [Louis] Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic positions” — and campaign contributions he received from leaders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an association that has been roundly attacked by Republican opponent Alan Fine and Independence Party rival Tammy Lee.
But the story also led with the interesting observation that Ellison was campaigning “without food or water during the daylight hours” due to Ramadan, and described in detail his diverse legislative work — commonsensical facts that set it apart from its national competitors.
Meanwhile, at this late stage in the campaign, the candidate himself seems not too bothered by the dominant angle taken by the press this fall, saying “it’s natural.”
“The media are always interested in ‘firsts,'” Ellison says in an email via his spokeswoman. “But once I’m elected, the novelty will wear off, and I expect the focus to shift to the work I do in Congress — as it should.”
A quote he gave the Star Tribune in its profile was perhaps more telling.
Detractors “always go back to my religion, what I called myself. It’s all smear stuff,” Ellison told the paper. “I must have taken hundreds of votes, introduced lots of bills, made comments in committees. You know how often I’ve been asked about my record in the Legislature? It’s almost completely ignored.”
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