Can Media Combat Anti-Muslim Sentiment?

Historically, the relationship between Islam and Hollywood has been charged. On Thursday, three panelists met at Stanford University to discuss ways to increase understanding and spread accurate representations of Muslims in the media.

This event, “News Media and Hollywood,” is part of the Abbasi Program's 2011-12 “We the People: Islam and U.S. Politics” series.

Vincent Barletta, associate professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford, was the panel’s moderator.

Camille Alick, the program director of Muslims on Screen and Television (MOST), said that on Islam, “Hollywood needed access to accurate information.”

MOST helps writers combat stereotypes, and has seen some success. Terrorists portrayed in films and on TV are not always Muslims, she said, and showed a clip from a recent episode of “The Good Wife” to illustrate her point.

Alick is also working with the $40 billion videogame industry to ensure their representation of Muslims is accurate. She finds that like most minorities, the six million Muslims in the U.S. are underrepresented in videogames in addition to films and television.

The son of a Christian mother and a Jewish father, author Michael Wolfe converted to Islam in 1987. He has experienced strong reactions to his conversion and found that even before 9/11, “most Americans were passively suspicious of Islam.”

His response was to work with the nonprofit Unity Productions Foundation in 2002 to produce a two-hour PBS documentary called Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet. It aired around the world in a dozen languages on the National Geographic Channel.

"Neurologists say it takes 14 positive impressions to wipe out a negative impression,” Wolfe said.

He finds being a Muslim in U.S. very challenging. The news media, he said, are inflammatory and misleading. Two examples he gave were the Koran burning in Florida and the outcry about building a mosque near Ground Zero.

As we approach an election year the radio airwaves are flooded with the hateful language of anti-Muslim rhetoric as bigoted people try to create a wedge issue. Wolfe is concerned that Americans will fall for the demonizing of Muslims. Fortunately, “it is not like McCarthyism in the 1950s when there was no PBS, no Colbert, or no Daily Show,” he said.

The third panelist, Joel Brinkley, the Hearst Professional in Residence for the journalism program at Stanford, said he doesn’t watch TV. As a former reporter, editor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Brinkley relies on newspapers and their foreign correspondents.

“Foreign correspondents play a critical role. No one else goes where we go and sees what we see,” Brinkley said. But most reporters write about the squalor and death squads in the Muslim world. They follow the newsman’s aphorism: “We don’t write about the planes that don’t crash.”

Barletta spoke of growing up in Oakland in the 1970s and having positive feelings about the local Muslims who were black Americans. But in 1979 when the American embassy in Tehran was overtaken by a mob of radical Muslims, he felt betrayed and confused, and he wondered what hand the media had in his reaction.

“I read newspapers, but unfortunately, most Americans don’t. They watch TV or go online," Alick said. "People believe what they see even though it’s fictional; TV is powerful and has a global reach.”