Page - 188 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Kenneth Starck | Perpetuating Prejudice 188 Arabs today live throughout the United States. About a third are in the states of California, New York, and Michigan. Cities with the largest Arab American populations are Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. (Haddad 2004). With this as the backdrop, we now begin turning our attention to the media. The next section presents several useful concepts in carrying out this inquiry. 3. Toward a Conceptual Approach: Framing, Othering Two primary concepts have been utilized in guiding the preparation of this paper. One has emerged in the area of media studies as a useful idea in the formulation, transmission, and interpretation of messages. That is the notion of framing. The other is just that – the “other,” a concept which in its application attempts to define the self in relation to others, especially those who are different in some significant aspect, such as appearance, behavior, or belief. Both concepts have enjoyed wide popularity and, as a result, have generated a wide variety of applications and interpretations. The concepts of framing and othering, as used in this paper, will be assumed to have both serious political and social ramifications. First, let us turn to framing. This is a relatively recent approach in media research. It simply, yet powerfully, tries to illuminate the ways in which information is selected from a larger context – say, an event or an issue – and then is organized and, ultimately, communicated to others and, in the process, takes on new or different meanings. Or, as Reese (2001) writes, Framing is concerned with the way interests, communicators, sources, and culture combine to yield coherent ways of understanding the world, which are developed using all of the available verbal and visual symbolic resources (p. 11). Further, in a thoughtful review of media research utilizing framing, Reese offers his own working definition which, though oriented toward the social, has obvious implications in the political realm: Frames are organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world (p. 11; italics in original). Organizing refers to comprehensiveness, while principle refers to something abstract and not necessarily conveyed explicitly in a message. Shared refers to