Page - 192 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Kenneth Starck | Perpetuating Prejudice 192 stereotypes and caricatures corrupt the imagination, narrow our vision and blur reality” (1984, p. 3). Several fundamental problems in U.S. media coverage of the Middle East were identified by Edmund Ghareeb (1983), a former journalist in the Middle East with a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University. His study encom- passed two time periods, 1975-77 and 1979-82. The research was supported by the American-Arab Affairs Council, a nonprofit group whose goal is to promote understanding between the U.S. and Arab countries. His approach was to interview nearly two dozen prominent journalists and review content analysis studies of U.S. newspapers and magazines by several scholars. He was interested to see if the media over time adopted a more balanced approach to covering the Middle East. He identified a number of reasons for media’s failure to be fair, including cultural bias, the Arab-Israel conflict, media igno- rance of the history and origins of the conflict, and a sophisticated Israeli lobby. Other factors were Arab failure to understand the U.S. media and apa- thy by the Arab-American community. During the second period, Ghareeb detected only a “perceptible change” of less distortion and bias in U.S. media performance. This resulted in part from the efforts of Arab-American organizations combating stereotyping. This 1983 examination of U.S. media treatment of Arabs included essays by scholars who were among the first to analyze other media – cartoons, contemporary fiction, television and textbooks – for bias and distortion. Their findings were similar to those found in the newspapers and magazines. A scholar who has studied broadly and published widely on the topic of America and Arabs is Michael W. Suleiman. He has severely criticized media – films, the entertainment industry, television, literature, textbooks – for their general and repeated portrayal of Arabs in negative terms (1989 and 1999a). Further, he argues that Arab Americans tend to be visible and invisible at the same time – visible when there is turmoil in the Middle East and invisible when they experience bias and discrimination (1999a). Arabs in the U.S., he noted, are “white but not quite” (p. 44). Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. represent not only the “other,” but their counterparts in other parts of the world are seen as even worse, leading Suleiman to assert that “...for Americans, the non-western Muslims/Arabs have become the other of the other of the other...” (p. 44). In an extensive content analysis of the representation of Arabs in U.S. television and radio stations, Lind and Danowski (1998) found that stereotypes of previous research were being repeated and reinforced. They examined three years of transcripts of news and public affairs programming for three U.S. networks, ABC (American Broadcasting Company), CNN (Cable News Network), PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), and a non-profit radio station,