Following 9/11, and early on in his reporting career, MSNBC anchor Ayman Mohyeldin said he was focused less on acting as a representative for the Muslim community and more on making sure his reporting was accurate and had all the necessary context. In the political discourse surrounding the early years of the “war on terror,” Mohyeldin said he noticed broad generalizations were being used when discussing the Middle East, minimizing them in making them synonymous with war and terrorism. He said he was focused on representing that nuance to audiences who sometimes had “these general stereotypes of Muslims always being at war, or backward, or extremists.” After 9/11, Mohyeldin recalled inflammatory headlines that would depict Muslims as villains. “We were trying to answer these questions of why do Muslims hate us,” he said. “And that terminology was completely off base and inappropriate for meaningful conversations to try to understand what was actually happening.” Mohyeldin joined HuffPost national reporter Rowaida Abdelaziz in a conversation with PBS NewsHour’s Amna Nawaz on Sept. 8.
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