There can be no mistake, however, what Elliott's "beat" is at the Times. It's not simply "Muslims in America." She is not a religion reporter--a job that usually covers all religions and focuses on religious practice. Rather, her beat is properly summarized as "Muslims and Terrorism in America." Elliott's assignment, which developed in the wake of Sept. 11, is to delve into American Islam in order to understand terrorism.

[Side note: You can identify what a reporter's beat is by seeing what short, quick-turnaround-for-little-reward stories her editor assigns her. Take for example the courts story "Two Somali Americans Charged With Aiding Terror". The job fell to ... Andrea Elliott.]

The result of her work is quite predictable: Far from providing genuine insight into the causes of terrorist extremism, Elliott's reporting tends to orientalize her subjects and trade in rather crude stereotypes. Let me offer two examples from the first page of her January feature for the New York Times Magazine, "The Jihadist Next Door," about homegrown terrorist Omar Hammami.

Elliott writes about Hammami:

Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria, Hammami was every bit as Alabaman as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman who sprinkles her conversation with blandishments like "sugar" and "darlin'."

Here Elliott seems to suggest that being Alabaman and having a Syrian name are incompatible. This is, of course, a silly comment and would remain so about whatever name might sound exotic to the average reader's ear. (She could just as easily have written: "Despite a name like Hammami, he liked grits.") But the comment becomes especially egregious in light of Alabama's own history: Birmingham, Alabama, has been home to a vibrant Arab-American community since the 19th Century. An Arab-sounding name is as Alabaman as an Italian-sounding name reflects New York.

Elliott goes on to write:

Not long ago, the threat of American-bred terrorists seemed a distant one. Law-enforcement officials theorized that Muslims in the United States -- by comparison with many of their European counterparts -- were upwardly mobile, socially integrated and therefore less susceptible to radicalization.

The seamless move here from the first to the second sentence suggests Elliott exhaustively identifies the class of American-bred terrorists with American Muslims, as if there could never be an American-bred terrorist who isn't a Muslim. It's as if Timothy McVeigh or the KKK never happened.

Apart from this disturbing tendency, Elliott's articles generally settle for conventional narratives that give the reader a false sense of understanding the subject she writes about without offering a genuine explanation or challenging popular (mis-)conceptions of American Muslims. For example, to summarize the Hammami article's narrative simplistically but, I would argue, not unfairly: young, "normal" teenage boy from Alabama takes his Islam seriously, and eventually becomes a violent extremist. With a tale told this way, the conclusion a reader naturally draws is that a devotion to Islam caused the teen to become a terrorist. Of course, a similar tale could be told in a different case by replacing "Islam" with "Christianity", which should tell us that the key for unlocking the phenomenon rests not with a deeper understanding of Islam.

This reflects a general problem with journalists, especially newspaper reporters: the tendency to fixate on the idiosyncratic details of a particular story, without trying to come to grips with a genuine explanation of the phenomenon their covering. (Explanations come from experts, and even though reporters do consult them for stories, their contributions tend to be limited by the reporters' own understanding of those stories.)

How then are we supposed to come to grips with the likes of Faisal Shahzad? In short, we need the help of social psychologists. I will discuss this in my next post.

UPDATE: I focused on Times reporter Andrea Elliott as emblematic of a more general trend in the mainstream media to orientalize American Muslims.  After all, Elliott's approach has garnered a Pulitzer Prize, the highest endorsement by the newspaper community.

For another example, consider the Times' May 5 profile of the Shahzad family, entitled "Money Woes, Long Silences and a Zeal for Islam."  It shows that the "newspaper of record" is willing to junk the most basic of journalistic principles to support the thesis that Islam is culpable.

Try to believe that the Times published the following hearsay:

A Pakistani man said that an acquaintance of his who was a friend of the Shahzad family told him that within the past year, Mr. Shahzad had peered critically at a glass of whiskey the friend was holding, indicating a judgmental stance typical for rigid jihadis.

Or this hearsay:

But Dr. Anwar said he had been in touch with a university classmate of Mr. Shahzad’s, a man of Pakistani descent who told Dr. Anwar he did not want to be interviewed by reporters. The classmate said he had remained friends with the couple and had noticed something different about Mr. Shahzad about a year ago.

“His personality had changed — he had become more introverted,” Dr. Anwar said the classmate told him. “He had a stronger religious identity, where he felt more strongly and more opinionated about things.”

Or consider that the newspaper was even desperate enough to go dumpster-diving, a la Harvey Levin, in search of "evidence":

Piles of garbage remained outside the home in Shelton this week, filled with clues about their lives. There were packets of Nair, moisturizer with Arabic writing on the back, a makeup brush, a Japanese cherry blossom scent body spritzer, wrapping paper and gift bags that appeared to be for baby gifts.

Ah yes, clues.  So pregnant with meaning.  The garbage of an average middle-class American family, and yet … not.

What do we really know about Faisal Shahzad? The evidence suggests that he had become radicalized to the point of being willing to blow up innocent Americans in a terrorist attack.  But do we know what type of radicalization he underwent?  Or what made him violent? Let us not let prejudices get in the way of a serious, objective investigation of this case or of the phenomenon in general.