provided scholarship on this via his examination of race and the media through
the lens of representation. Academic Christopher Campbell compellingly asserts
that Hall used the term representation to describe the complex ways in which
political actors and the mass media not only present images, but also how they
engage in re-presenting images that have multiple meanings; especially when it
comes to meanings regarding race and ethnicity (Campbell, 2016). Hall’s work
compellingly challenged the ‘preferred reading’ of media texts, describing the
cultural power of those meanings as the ‘politics of signification’ whereby
different people’s social situations will change the meanings of texts and lead to
an ‘opposition reading’ (Hall, 1980, p.138). Hall’s work has therefore importantly
provided insight into the means by which the media can portray race in a harmful
way.
What can be most damaging about oppositional readings produced by the
media and political actors is the onward effect that they can have on public
opinion and the justification of violence against certain groups. Particularly, a
contemporary example of this is the marginalisation of Muslim communities
during the period of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. During this time, it
can be said that the Western media manipulated the terrorist attacks and defined
such events within contexts of religious extremism and global violence, resulting
in ‘negative, fear-inducing, and stereotypical images of Muslims’ (El-Aswad,
2013, p.39). More specifically and detrimentally, the American media adopted
what Alsultany has termed ‘Simplified Complex Representation’ which was an
effort to balance a negative representation of the American Muslim community
with a positive one (Alsultany, 2013). The ‘positive’ representations of the
‘enemy’ become essential in the depiction of the US as benevolent (Alsultany,
2013). Contrarily however, the media reserved the images of violence for external
Muslims, those who did not live in America (Ibrahim, 2010).
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