Racial Representation In Media

Media are everywhere, from newspaper to cinema. General public are influencing by reading news or watching movies. Media is a powerful weapon to change people’s minds. The more people read or watch, their beliefs, views, opinions will be affected. Racial representation in media has developed the views of society toward different nationalities, religious and coloured skin human. For instance, Muslim and Islam are two of the most controversial ethnicity and religious, and the most representation about them are negative. A common misconception is that Muslims hate other religious. Through different media, people can see the distinct point of views toward representation of news. This essay will focus on the race representation of Muslim and Islam

The terms Muslims and Islam are connected with extremism, jihad, militant. In addition, television news and documentaries have strong influence the on view of people about Islam. A research done in United State and western Europe have interviewed 2420 people, almost half of them agreed that television documentaries had a very strong influence on their view of Muslim (Guardian, 2005). The recurring language used in news to describe Islam and Muslims can come to be representative of all Muslims and Islam as a religion. Dominant stereotype represents Muslim men as terrorists or extremists, while women are portrayed as hijab who need to be emancipated from oppression and violence (Akbarzadeh and Smith, 2005). They have researched two newspapers from Australia. Negative stories reproduce the notion that Muslims and Islam are alien and un-Australian. ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ are used as adjectives in news articles, for example ‘Islam fundamentalism’, ‘Muslim hardliners’, ‘Muslim fanatics’, ‘Muslim extremists’, ‘Muslim protestors’. They have also noted that the words used to descript Muslims and Islam include ‘blood-letting’, ‘angry’, ‘threaten’, ‘trigger’ and ‘attack’. These words imply that people should be scared by Islamic groups. Islamic terrorists are fighting ‘holy war’ against Western culture and values. Akbarzadeh and Smith

Almost all of them are extremely negative (Allen, 2012). A report done by Mayor of London (2007) suggest that the representation of Muslims and Islam in British press get even worse than before. They have selected a normal week from 8th May to 14th May and analysis the Muslims and Islam related articles. The report had analyzed 19 national newspapers. Twelve of them have completely negative framed or associated coverage of Islam and Muslims. 91% of all newspapers was considered to be negative. 84% represented Islam and Muslims either ‘likely to cause damage or danger’ or as ‘operating in a time of intense difficulty or danger’. 50% of coverage mentioned Muslim or Islam as a ‘threat’ and 34% linked to crises. This report showed that Muslim and Islam are negatively represented as the antithesis or other to ‘the west’, Muslims have very different belief comparing to the west. As this kind of representation of Muslims, general public may believe that what they are reading are the truths. This will cause a break up of the society due to Muslims and non-Muslims do not have enough understanding of each other. Muslims who live in west countries will be treated unequally. The report indicated that there are no common between Islam and West in the dominant view of media, British Muslims are being