I am a journalism major and I decided to dive into some research about how Western journalism and media impacts the way we view the Arab culture. I found a JStor journal article from the Middle East Journal called “Islam and the Western Journalist” and I wanted to share with you all. My takeaway was that the piece essentially argues the way western media portrays Muslim people impacts the reality of Muslim thought. The first portion of the article goes into depth about the basic practices of journalists and what they aim to do. The author defines journalism as “the production of general knowledge.” and that ” a journalist is someone who has to sift the particular knowledge and experience of individuals or groups of people, and to extract from it a message which larger groups are able to understand and willing to hear.” The article goes on to argue that there is a weakness in how western journalism treats the Islamic world. The author references a book called Covering Islam which argues that instead of understanding the Islamic world western journalists have simply “tried to explain them in terms of the peculiarities of Islam as a religion, or of Islamic languages and cultures such as Arabic and Persian, which are supposed to predetermine the course of Muslim thought.” The author argues that as a result western society has viewed the Muslim people as “irrational savages” instead of trying to sympathize with the various Muslim peoples.
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