News coverage of the hostage crisis echoed Carter's words to a captive American audience that watched the news in record numbers. Special programming such as ABC's America Held Hostage communicated the message that America at large, and Americans everywhere, were being victimized by the brown, bearded Muslim extremists in the Middle East. The fear stoked by the mainstream news also warned of a Muslim takeover stateside, corroborated in the minds of viewers by the rising Muslim population and the "significant rise in the number of mosques and Muslim associations in the 1970s and 1980s." Again, citizenship did not protect Muslim Americans from being roped into guilt and conflated with an incident that was neither representative of Islam nor unfolding domestically, but one perpetrated by a specific nation-state on the other side of the world.

XREF: Connects to recurring dynamics of citizenship failing to shield minority groups from guilt-by-association during crises — parallels other post-9/11 and war era scapegoating patterns.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 249