Authorizing Others: Portrayals of Middle Eastern Destinations in Travel Media

Abstract

Media analysts have long discussed the powerful role of media in discursively constructing realities pertaining to foreign conflicts (Price and Tewksbury, 1997). According to Tumber and Webster (2006), media are central to the debate on how to comprehend international conflict. Media representations are thought to be particularly influential when an audience has limited or no contact with the portrayed population (Fujioka, 1999). Scholars have examined the dominant media portrayal of the Middle East, which they claim is most often articulated via frames of terrorism, fanaticism, Islamist radicalism and an overall threat to Western society (Hashem, 1997; Slade, 1981). The 9/11 tragedy and subsequent US-led wars in the Middle East are currently central to the framing of this region (Steiner, 2007; Timothy and Daher, 2009). As Wang, Ding, Scott and Fan (2010) argue, ‘The watershed events of September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent worldwide war on terrorism have exacerbated an already distorted attitude towards Muslims and the Islamic regions’ (p. 118). Post 9/11, Kumar (2010), for instance, outlines five central frames used in dominant American media constructions of the Middle East: hideboundness/inflexibility, gender discrimination — male dominance/oppressed women, irrationality, violence and terrorism. The ideology underpinning these frames regards the ‘West’ as a leader of democracy and enlightenment and the Muslim world as mired in backwardness and intolerance (Kumar, 2010).