Nemah-Allah Saleh portfolio
Does the media contribute to the perpetuation of stereotypes and prejudice for Muslims in the US?
I
"The subtlest and most pervasive of influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And, those preoccupations, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception” (Walter Lippmann).
Why and how do people form stereotypes that are common in today’s society? What results from what the media portrays in society itself? Sometimes we might ask ourselves that the correlation of stereotypes between gender, religion, race, and sexual orientation might come from friends, family, or coworkers. However we must impose a larger and more important question such as where did these people get these ideas from?
First, media is a global connection that is popular, public, and not to mention widespread. It includes television shows, virtual and printed literature, the internet, and most importantly movies and news coverage. As a result, in today’s society stereotyping is looming.
Media affects people a number of ways this can be shown how people view others based on gender, sexual orientation, religion, and how many people stereotype every day. There could be a number of examples shown based on these points.
If the media influences stereotyping, then does it also have a connection correlated to hate crimes? Daily news infrequently pays attention to ideas. They focus on incidents instead of the conditions and they also focus on the conflict rather than the solutions.
The victims are newlyweds Deah Barakat, 23, a University of North Carolina dental student, and his wife Yusor Mohammad, 21, and Yusor's sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19. They were all shot execution style by Grieg Hicks on the evening of February 10 (“US Media Bias Shown in Coverage of Chapel Hill Murders”).
What inspired me write about this was the incident that occurred in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. While finishing my homework and getting ready for bed, I received a text from my friend at 10:30 PM. The text was, “Nemah, guess what? Yusor and Razan were shot in their apartment; I think Deah was with them too. I don’t know if he was shot too. QUICK! OPEN FB! :’(.” I opened Facebook to see my feed filled with friends and family sharing a video of who appeared to be Deah’s dad asking the police about his son. I met Razan and Yusor once when I visited my friend in Raleigh. Yet, in a matter of minutes we became friends. On the night of their death, I didn’t really know if they were actually dead or not. I waited for news channels to cover the issue, but not a single one did.
“The murders of three young American Muslims have outraged users on social media and drawn criticism of U.S. media for what many see as inadequacies in covering the story because the victims were Muslims”. (Kenasari)
Reporting on news channels was skewed. First, the murder of the three Muslim students surfaced in major news channels after 12 hours of the incident. Many people over social media websites received the news from the MuslimlivesMatter hashtag and the Chapel Hill shooting hashtag before the coverage.
Media coverage for the Chapel Hill shooting made me question the type of coverage by the media on Muslims and it inspired me to question how this influences the perpetuating of stereotypes in the United States. This bigger question lead me to an even smaller question that I will not further investigate since it goes off topic. That is if the media's representation and coverage of Muslims really did influence the murderer of the three students to commit this crime. I wondered if murderer related the three students to the kinds of Muslims that the media is trying to convey.
Media outlets such as the Fox news segment below focused more on the "anger problem" of the murderer and about blaming the whole crime on a "parking problem". Some news channels went as far as taping segments on how to find a good parking spot. To me, this revealed how much the news would go to cover up a problem and make people think a certain way.
“Had the killer been a Muslim and his victims’ three white college students, CNN and Fox News probably would have reported it earlier Wednesday,” said William Youmans, assistant professor of Media and Public affairs at George Washington University. “No mainstream media raised the possibility it was a terrorist attack. Had the killer been Muslim, they would have without a doubt,” he said (Kenasari).
TWITTER/
Analysis
Since 9/11, negative messages about Muslims have received more media attention than positive ones.
They were being represented as violent and as threats to the western civilization. After watching many news segments, I realized that almost all of the segments portrayed Muslims in a negative way.
The news and several media outlets portray inconsistent coverage of regional and global conflicts. For example, a month before the Chapel Hill shooting, the Charlie-hebdo incident took place in Paris. Islam was being targeted since the individuals responsible for the incident were Muslim. However, when the Chapel Hill incident took place, the man was not labeled for his religion. The observation of the twitter accounts of two major news channels clearly indicated this (Kamalipour, Yahya, and Carilli)
The picture on the right, the murderer of the three students was called a man by both Fox news and CNN. Yet, the murderers in the Charlie-hebdo incident were called terrorists. When I saw this, I questioned the difference that lies between the uses of words. Why would there be such a huge difference between the uses of words even though the same act was committed. I wandered what the goals behind these media sources would be. Why was the Charlie-hebdo incident that occurred in Paris covered instantly as compared to the Chapel Hill incident here in the US covered hours and hours after?
According to Gregg Hoffman, a researcher and a writer about racial stereotyping in the news, stereotyping in the news might exist as a result of lack of ethnic diversity in the newsrooms, lack of sensitivity or awareness of cultures, the business demand and professional values in the media, and the expectations of the public (Hoffmann, 25).
Why does stereotyping exist in the news?
Experiment
To test this, I conducted an experiment on two of my friends. This experiment was slightly different but was based on Devine’s experiment in social psychology. First, I flashed words on a screen quickly so they wouldn’t recall them. After that, I made both of them read a paragraph about a stranger who was violent, cruel and committed a crime. When I asked them about who they thought the person was. They related the words that were shown to them earlier with the stranger in paragraph they read. They started identifying the man based on the words I have flashed to them in the beginning of the experiment. These words were terrorist, extremist, terrifying, and phobia. Then the group concluded that he was from a religious group or from a foreign country.
The most important point out of this experiment is to show how stereotypes can influence people’s understanding and processing of media messages when they are not aware of it. As a result, people will generally make stereotype interpretations of movies and news channels even if they reject the stereotype. Every representation of a member of a social group can trigger the stereotype of the whole group. This is the result of the constant negative coverage of a group on daily basis.
How does this work? Click here! (Lesson)
Schemas is a physiological term that indicates a mental concept which informs a person about what to expect from situations and experiences. It helps people categorize the world showing the basic characteristics of the things that people encounter. This leads people to make judgments about the environment without too much mental effort. Schemas structure expectations and knowledge of things. Furthermore, it makes a person to expect certain things once a category has been formed or encountered. Once a schema has been featured, it is followed by priming. This is when the schema is activated in the environment. For example, related concepts tend to be triggered and primed. For instance when an event is primed, people are more likely to respond to them than to unrelated concepts (Ruscher, 56).
Schemas are stereotypes that help people organize their beliefs and knowledge about social groups. They influence people’s expectations and influence how people perceive incoming messages.
Movies and Muslims stereotyping
Other media sources also have a major effect on stereotyping are movies. American sniper is a recent and popular movie that received criticism for influencing prejudice and hate crimes against Muslims. Directly after the film’s release, threats against Arabs and Muslims have soared. For example, the tweets posted below indicated how people feel about Muslims and Arabs after watching the movie. As a result, some Muslim families and mosques were targeted. The Chapel Hill shooting might have been influenced by American sniper, or the Muslim family who had 18 shots fired into their home at night, leaving the woman in the hospital. “We don’t know what this is related to, if it was a random shooting or targeting,” Abdul told reporters outside his home. “We hope it’s not the second case” ("Liberal Political News").
Twitter reactions
American Sniper
How Muslims feel and are Treated Today?
Here in Charlotte, some students and friends of mine have been discriminated against for wearing the headscarf and for being Muslim. In the posts below, my friends express how they are treated and how they feel being at work or in school. Hadeel, a Muslim girl who wears the headscarf and works in uptown Charlotte is constantly being watched by police officers while she is working in her desk and while she is having lunch. “As I started working here, I noticed many changes happen in a matter of days”, she explained to me. “There are two police officers that always come and circle my desk every hour and sometimes they come and look at my screen”, she said. “I am irritated and I can’t do anything about it.”
“Why do you think this happens, and why are Muslims being targeted in the United States?” I asked.
“I think it is the media that influences people, the constant coverage of Muslims being labeled as terrorists has lead people to think that every person that is Muslim is one”, Hadeel answered (Zaben).
So, how do media sources influence the way people think?
Psychology.
Single Stories : Today
My Inquiry topic relates to a concept I have learned in my UWRT 1102 class and that is forming single stories. In the video below, Ngozi Adichie describes the dangers of a single story and how it changes people’s thoughts about a group of people. She mentions that when she was little she used to read British and American children's books. Furthermore, she when she started writing, she wrote about the characters that had blue eyes, talked about the weather, and drank ginger beer. She only knew these things about them and nothing else. “What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.” Adichie wrote.
This shows how vulnerable and susceptible we are in the face of a story. The book that Adichie read when she was a child resembles the media sources and news channels for adults today. They choose to incorporate certain ideas and thoughts for people so individuals can form their own single stories. However, there are solutions and that is rejection, paying attention and being educated. “When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise” (Adichie). Perhaps the only solutions to breaking these stereotypes is the change in media itself by laying the foundation for a better society or if education starts to govern our own perception of viewing things.