The Media's Role in a Clash of Misconceptions: The Case of the Danish Muhammad Cartoons

Abstract

The Danish cartoon furor of early 2006 was only the most recent episode cited as evidence of a “clash of civilizations.” Although the subject was extensively reported by the global media, the media's framing of the debate as being between free speech and religious sensitivities was inherently flawed and contributed to further confusion rather than clarification. Moreover, the framework established and perpetuated by the media, that of a debate between freedom of speech and religious sensitivities, obscured the root cause of this conflict: the fact that both the Muslim world and the Western world suffer from gross misconceptions of the other. Although the misconceptions held by the Muslim world are phenomena that are, in relative terms, both more recent and more easily resolved, their counterparts in the Western world have been deeply embedded in the consciousness of Western society for more than a thousand years.This study examines the role of centuries of European media self-censorship on the subject of Muhammad in the most recent episode in this ongoing clash of misconceptions.

The effect of intergroup threat and social identity salience on the belief in conspiracy theories over terrorism in indonesia: collective angst as a mediator

“…As reported by some studies, those factors that have ever made Muslim attain considerable prominence and salience as a social category are, among other things, the Rushdie Affair in 1988-89, the first Gulf war in 1991, and the September 11th, controversial Danish caricature of Prophet Muhammad (Ahmad & Evergeti, 2010;Hussain, 2007;Modood & Ahmad, 2007;Peek, 2005). All of these events in essence are not in favor of Muslims and thus threaten their existence, from which Muslims' negative attitudes and stereotyping against Western countries eventually emerge (Murshed, 2010).…”

Boundary Struggles: Contestations of free speech in the Norwegian public sphere

“…), and this loss of context makes the situation ripe for misunderstandings and interpretations (cf. Hussain, 2007). Decontextualization can also be seen as part of the logic noted by Durham Peters (2008) in which particular subject matter tends to be subsumed under the freedom of expression heading.…”

“…Why have political cartoons become so enmeshed in the debates over freedom of expression during the past decade and stood out so clearly in terms of the size of media coverage? Previous research has shown that the cartoons spurred debate because they lent themselves readily to the aims of strategic interest groups and could fit in with existing and emergent media logic (Eide, Kunelius, & Phillips, 2008;Hussain, 2007;Sniderman et al, 2014). In the cartoon controversies, different justifications rub against each other, spurring reactions, both violent and non-violent.…”

The Muhammad cartoons controversy in comparative perspective

“…This is unsurprising, because the controversy was not only created in and by news media, but also constituted as a media event, in several senses. First, the controversy was diffused, accelerated and turned into an international and transnational event by news media, not only in terms of the spread of the images in the first place and representation of ensuing reactions in the Muslim world and elsewhere, but also in terms of the mobilizing function, indeed at times the independently acting and politicizing role of news media (Douai, 2007;Hussain, 2007;Olesen, 2006a). Olesen's article in this issue pays particular attention to the role of media in transnational diffusion as 'trans-space communication with an indirect relationship between authors and audiences' where 'media disconnects claims from their authors and make them available to large undefined audiences'.…”