Page - 190 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Kenneth Starck | Perpetuating Prejudice 190 modern societies. He noted that such images are complex and imprecise. He continued: In its widest and colloquial form, an enemy image is a culturally influenced, very negative, and stereotyped evaluation of the “other” – be it individuals, groups, nations, or ideologies. (p. 2). Feelings of one group toward another theoretically could range all the way from tolerance to violence. There’s no problem tolerating a small, non- threatening group. But violence could come into play if one group threatened another’s security. Sentiments toward others exist at several levels and especial- ly come into play when immigrants – “foreigners”, if you will – are involved. When immigrants begin organizing and ultimately form a nation, do they reach a point that they must negate others in order to discover and retain their own national or ethnic identity? This is an intriguing question raised by Fiebig-von Hase (1997) and harkens back to Schneider’s (2001) probing of German identity, or “Germanness”. Unfortunately, the examination of that question must remain for another time and another place. To sum up, we’ve kept our conceptualization of this paper relatively simple. The goal was to devise an approach that offered possibilities of expla- nation and organization. So, to help us understand the way in which U.S. me- dia have portrayed the indigenous Arab community, we have combined the notions of framing – media professionals conceptualizing and developing stories – with othering – the propensity for individuals and groups to define themselves by excluding or marginalizing others. 4. What Research Tells Us about U.S. Media Portrayal of Arabs and Arab Americans This section will review studies that have centered on the ways in which Arabs have been portrayed in the U.S. media. Hundreds of such studies have been carried out, though few focus exclusively on Arab Americans. Most deal with Arabs and other people of the Middle East, but the impact of such coverage inevitably affects perceptions of those Arabs who have chosen to make their homes in the U.S. The intention here is not to present a complete or even exhaustive accounting of all the studies. Instead, we will identify what appear to be some of the more significant studies with the intention of attaining a relatively representative sample over time. Many of the studies contain exten- sive literature reviews up to the time of publication and thus would represent a