Media, Stereotypes and Muslim Representation: World After Jyllands-Posten Muhammad Cartoons Controversy

Abstract

In the 21st century media has become the dominant source of knowledge of Islam and Muslims and selectively decides what the West should know about Islam and what should be hidden. However, the underlying assumption is that, the media as an institution forming stereotypes depends on the local socio-cultural context. The goal of this paper – to find out how media (as the mediator) forms values, world view of a society, creates stereotypes in different cultural environments through analysis of Muhammad cartoons. The objectives are: to define the concepts of Neo-Orientalism, Muslimophobia and Islamophobia; to find out the connection between media representations and negative images of Islam and Muslims in the society; to reveal the main stereotypes of Muslims and Islam in online media in 4 different countries by analysing the case of Muhammad cartoons. The conducted qualitative and quantitative content analysis confirmed the hypothesis that in the specific cultures the same event is presented in different ways while forming value based orientation for a specific audience. Western media seeks to portray Muslims as terrorists / Islamists that are against West, their values and any possibility of integration in Western societies. Meanwhile, Lebanon and India (Kashmir) media does not portray orientalism and Islamophobic views, because audiences are dominated by Muslims. However there are noticeable manifestations of Occidentalism - resistance to the West and the Islamophobic portrayal of public in media. Moreover, information serves as a public mobilization function, so there are reasons to believe that violent protests in Kashmir and Lebanon could have been encouraged by the media.

Islamophobia in non-Western media: A content analysis of selected online newspapers

“…Researchers recently paid much attention to news media coverage of religious issues (Bowe et al, 2015;Sutkutė, 2019), focusing on newspaper coverage of Islam and Muslims. Studies have examined newspapers (Bowe et al, 2013(Bowe et al, , 2015Nanabawa, 2013;Rane & Abdalla, 2008;Schneider, 2011;Sutkutė, 2019), perhaps because they are significant sources of news, and emerging technologies promise even more options for expanding their reach (Rothmann & Koch, 2014). Despite this development, unethical reporting in newspapers has raised the question of whether journalists have done more good than harm when covering events and issues that touch upon religion in particular.…”

“…This is because news media, at least in the United States, tend to highlight prejudice in news descriptions of religion (Bowe et al, 2015; Trevino et al, 2010), which could leave the masses susceptible to the manipulation of reality. In fact, the prevalent image of Islam created in U.S. news media has become a controversial issue (Bowe et al, 2015; Sutkutė, 2019).…”

Struggles for Horizontal Identification: Muslims, Jews, and the Civil Sphere in Germany

“…As Jewish incivility prior, Muslim incivility has proliferated in mainstream discourses in Germany and become embedded in social institutions, from media to law. Symbolic boundaries to polluting potentiality are seen, in particular, in media representations that call into question the belonging of Muslims in Germany (Saeed, 2007; Sutkute, 2019). And they can be seen across regulatory institutions, as well, in laws that both implicitly and explicitly target Muslims.…”

Representation of Roma in Lithuanian Online Media: 15MIN.LT and LRYTAS.LT Case Studies

“…It is also related to racism [29]. This concept emphasizes ideologically based hostility towards certain minority groups, as in the case of the concept of Islamophobia or Muslimophobia [30].…”