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date: 15 February 2025

News Coverage of Islam and Muslims in North Americalocked

News Coverage of Islam and Muslims in North Americalocked

  • Ahmed Al-RawiAhmed Al-RawiSchool of Communication, Simon Fraser University

Summary

Many scholars cite Edward Said’s concepts of Orientalism and Othering that drew on West-East binaries that position the West as civilized and the East as barbaric. Such Othering is represented in various Western media through the association of Muslims and Islam with violence, fundamentalism, and terrorism. While such representations were being developed within public discourse through early mass media during the post–World War II period, such discriminatory and reductionist representations of Muslims were more clearly seen within the US media during the Iranian Hostage Crisis and Gulf War periods. Said effectively outlines the various ways in which news coverage presented Arabs and Muslims as an imagined Other, reduced to specters of “Islam”—a constructed idea of the religion as violently opposed to American rights, values, and democracy. There is no doubt that the largest shift in nuance in the public discourse and media representation of Muslims occurred after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with hate speech, violence, racism, and fear toward Muslim communities increasing across North America. The main discourses on the Muslim communities in North America continued to be Orientalist in nature but more obviously racialized regardless of the varied geographical regions and ethnic heterogeneity of the peoples that make up these various Muslim groups. As a result, Islam itself was racialized and generally used as a pretext to oppress Muslims. Other major themes that emerge from the news coverage of Islam in North America include Islam as being oppressive, and the gendered representations of Muslims, especially veiled women as needing to be rescued.

Subjects

  • Islamic Studies

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