Phobia and Roots of Phobia in Western Media

 

By Mohsen Goudarzi.

 

 

 

Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, many scholars have talked about stereotypes of depicting and illustrating the east by the west. Said in this book defined orientalism as the acceptance in the West of “the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny and so on.” According to Said, Orientalism dates from the period of European Enlightenment and colonization of the Arab World. Orientalism provided a rationalization for European colonialism based on a self-serving history in which “the West” constructed “the East” as extremely different and inferior, and therefore in need of Western intervention or “rescue”.

Actually the west identity has involved in “creating” the east, historically. By making the east as dark “other”, the west legitimized itself for invading eastern countries, the period which called colonialism. After the long time of colonialism and due different political and internal reasons, western countries strategy has shifted to cultural period. The cultural hegemony of those industrialized or economically influential countries, which determine general cultural values and standardize civilizations throughout the world.

In this condition the role of media is outstanding. American media critic Herbert Schiller (1976) uses the term “Media Imperialism” to describe “the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating centre of the system.” The public media are the foremost example of operating enterprises that are used in the penetrative process. For penetration on a significant scale the media themselves must be captured by the dominating/penetrating power.”

Said not only in Orientalism, but also in Covering Islam (1981) stated the negative frameworks and stereotypes of showing Islamic countries by western media. In recent decades these media have emphasized the threat of the Islam for all around the world. Such a these threatening could be analyzed based on historic Orientalism and Cultural Imperialism. Actually, Islamophobia and other media-created phobia have originated in creating an enemy for surviving western discourses in different fields. The western government and international companies get used to creating and spreading these phobias for hiding their incompetence in solving internal and international problems. Problems which have told might be solved by insisting and persuading western thoughts and structures; something that never happened.

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