Orientalism for a New Millennium: Cable News and the Specter of the “Ground Zero Mosque”

Abstract

This study uses discourse analysis to examine the arc of cable news media coverage of the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque", a proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan that sparked widespread controversy. This article analyzes both the nature and duration of mainstream cable news coverage of the controversy and the major arguments put forth by those both supporting and opposing the center in the politically charged post-September 11 media environment. Google Trends data were employed to examine the duration of the controversy both in terms of broader media coverage and search volume for the term "Ground Zero Mosque" online. This study found several consistent trends in terms of the sources present in cable coverage opposing the center, as well as a very narrow set of talking points that underline the presence of what other researchers have identified as an Islamophobic network of individuals and organizations present in American mass media discourse.

Im Namen der Emanzipation

“…Andere Studien entgehen den Problemen des Runnymede-Modells, indem sie auf postkoloniale und rassismuskritische Ansätze zurückgreifen. Islamophobe Repräsentationen werden dann etwa als Prozesse der »Rassifizierung« (Joseph/D'Harlingue 2008;Meer/Modood 2010;Rana 2011;Shooman 2014a) oder als Fortführung »orientalistischer« Diskurse (Attia 2009;DeFoster 2015;Marx 2008;Powell 2011) begriffen. Beide Ansätze -›Rassifizierung‹ und ›Orientalismus‹ -werden in Kapitel 3 ausführlich diskutiert.…”

2014 Ebola newspaper coverage: through the lens of orientalism

“…Further research has looked into the portrayal of face veils and its connection to nationalist and colonialist ideals in Canadian newspapers (Alrasheed, 2013), Iran's nuclear program in American newspaper editorials (Izadi & Saghaye-Biria, 2007), Islamophobia in American cable news' coverage of the Ground Zero Mosque in New York (DeFoster, 2014), the othering of Muslim immigrant Americans that were once insiders but are now perceived as outsiders despite being American (Chuang & Roemer, 2013), Western newspaper's representation of Sunni-Shia relations and framing them through the war on terror rather than through cultural context (Douai & Lauricella, 2014), and portrayals of Muslim men and women as it relates to sex and marriage in a post 9/11 world (Eltantawy, 2008).…”