(Credit: Globe and Mail, screenshot)

Readers complained about the Globe and Mail‘s front page photo of “an unsmiling woman in a niqab with the words ‘Muslims Among Us’ written across the black cloth of the garment,” and the headline “What the new wave of immigrants can teach us about our capacity for fear,” public editor Sylvia Stead reported.

According to Stead, readers were concerned that the Canadian newspaper was being critical of Muslims, but Stead reported the word choice was to bring attention to the issue and be ‘provocative’.”  She quoted the newspaper’s weekend editor Carol Toller as explaining that the photo with the story, “The unfounded fear of Muslim immigration,” was to call out “misconceptions – invoking the stereotypes and immediately undercutting them.”

For her own part, Stead found that on its own “the headline was exclusionary” because it “inadvertently set up an ‘Us and Them’ mentality.”