Rethinking Media Portrayals of Islam
Turn to any television news channel, flip open any newspaper and
chances are good that you will come across a story discussing the
Middle East. Just this week, newspapers are filled with stories
about the assault on Fallujah, the death of a Dutch filmmaker or
even the death of Yasser Arafat, and one might find a whole bevy of
sweeping statements about the “Islamic World” or discussions about
a “Clash of Civilizations” (a la Samuel Huntington’s controversial
book of the same name) in many of the stories purporting to give
background information on these current situations. This supposed
information, however, is often ill-informed and misleading,
scholars argue.
It is time both those in the media and we as consumers of the
media and students in academia carefully scrutinize the discourses
about the Middle East, or indeed, any place in the world. Too
often, media and those discussing situations in the any foreign
place in the world rely on stereotypes and clich�s to
explain complicated, complex and diverse peoples and areas, leading
to misconceptions that can result in or fuel racism, hatred, as
well as serve to create or further supposed divides.
Edward Said, a literary and cultural critic who examined in his
seminal book “Orientalism” the way in which ideas about the East
got their start in Western imagination, found that texts by British
and French colonial officials and writers of the Imperial era
tended to portray the East as backwards and less “civilized” than
the West and were often blatantly misinformed and racist.
Today, these discourses about the East, and the Middle East in
particular, sadly still inform much of our discourse and so-called
news, Said suggests. As Said points out, when the so-called
“Islamic World” is pictured in newspapers today, it is usually only
in times of crisis and the presentation usually centers around how
the “Islamic World” is different from “ours.” Too often, this term
of “Islam World” is used as a term to represent a whole variety of
diverse peoples from various countries: “In no really significant
way is there a direct correspondence between the ‘Islam’ in common
Western usage and the enormously varied life that goes on within
the world of Islam, with its more than 8 billion people … its
dozens of societies, states, histories, geographies, cultures,”
Said notes in his book “Covering Islam.”
Indeed, even with such diversity present, news reports on the
so-called “Islamic World” are likely to lump together regions,
states, religious groups and peoples and even then only discuss
them in the context of crises. As Parvez Ahmed, a board member for
the Council on American-Islamic Relations notes, “A search of past
newspaper articles shows that terrorism, militancy or extremism by
a Muslim is frequently linked to his faith. The association is
1,000 to 1 times more likely for Muslims than any other faith
group.”
Furthermore, the United Kingdom’s Home Office Report (complied
by researchers from the University of Derby) found that 80 percent
of the Muslim organizations they interviewed said that coverage
presenting an unfair image of their religion was frequent. Such
portrayals, one commenter in the BBC series “Myths About Muslims”
noted, are “extending misconceptions about Islam and creating
hatred that sort of comes with those misconceptions.”
Just look at an MSNBC story of Nov. 9 in which it declared: “The
clash between Islam and outspoken artists is not new” for an
example of such dangerous generalizing.
By simply grouping such diverse places, ideas and peoples under
the term Islam we are not able to understand the complexity of many
situations involving these areas and, in many cases,
miss-representing the religion as it is practiced by many.
The Home Office Report suggests that education, better training
for journalists and writers, greater consultation with religious
groups and policy reviews to ensure equal treatment were necessary
to begin to repair this problem in the media. As Said also
suggests, journalists and academics alike must review what they are
saying about Islam and consider how perhaps their words are coming
out of the Imperialist tradition and seek to inform themselves more
clearly on issues. Said calls on reporters and academics (and
perhaps consumers) to be “more diligent” asking sources “to explain
‘Islamist’ instead of leaving its meaning open to the imagination
of uninformed readers.”
To do this, Said suggests in one of his last comments in 2003,
we might be able to “put aside our personal differences and work to
make a more humane world.”
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