Page 223 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

0 | Islam and the Med a

islaM and the Media
Particularly in the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. media’s methods of representing
Islam, Arabs, and people of Middle Eastern descent have been the subject of much
criticism. Critics have argued that the media’s representational strategies have de-
teriorated, going from bad to worse. The dominant pattern of American media
representations of Islam has a long history, stretching back beyond recent film,
television, and news reports to earlier traveler’s tales and colonial endeavors.

hisToriCaL BaCkgrounD

Historically, there has been little direct contact between the United States and
the region of the world where Islam grew and flourished, that is, the Middle
East and North Africa. In the nineteenth century, there were occasional travel-
ers to the region, such as Mark Twain and Herman Melville, and brief military
interventions in North Africa. Thus, unlike various European colonial powers,
such as Britain and France, the United States did not have a sustained presence
or direct involvement with the world of Islam. As a result, knowledge that was
produced in the United States of this region, and of Islam, was of an abstract and
second hand nature.
Media representations of the Middle East drew heavily from European vocab-
ularies. In early film this meant characterizing the Middle East by a few handy
caricatures—vast desert spaces, populated by scimitar-wielding sheiks wearing
long white robes, who lived in huge palaces with harems and dancing girls, and
were surrounded by snake charmers and flying carpets.
It was only after World War II that the United States turned its attention to the
Middle East and became a dominant force in the region. In this context, knowl-
edge had to be produced to help the United States better achieve its foreign pol-
icy objectives. Various “area studies” programs were founded after World War II
and the Middle East became a subject of inquiry.

oriEnTaLisT sChoLarshiP anD
moDErnizaTion ThEory

Many distinguished scholars from Europe traveled across the Atlantic to take
leadership positions at universities in the United States. The end result was the
production of at least two ways of understanding the world of Islam: European
Orientalist scholarship, and the research conducted from a social scientific ap-
proach. The latter championed modernization theory, and argued that developing
nations could advance by modernizing their economies with the assistance of the
United States. By and large, the news media covered the Middle East during this
period in ways similar to the rest of the world, they followed the modernization
frameworks set by policy makers. Within the context of the Cold War, the U.S.
capitalist/modernizing view was held as being superior to the Communist ide-
ology of the Soviet Union. While Islam made an occasional appearance, it was
not until the 1970s that it would be a subject of sustained attention.
Orientalist scholars have long viewed the Middle East through the lens of an
imaginary construct called “Islam.” Edward Said, a prominent critic of Western