Abstract
A cursory look at Indian prime-time news tells us much about the tone and tenor of the people associated with it. Exaggerations, hyperbole, and tempers run wild, and news anchors flail in theatrical rage. News channels and news editors display their ideological affiliations subliminally. These affiliations—a factor of personal political stances, funding bodies, and investors—lead to partisan bias in the framing of news and, in some cases, can easily translate into racial prejudice. In this paper, I examine news coverage related to Muslims in India. I study the coverage of two issues specifically—love jihad and triple talaq—in prime-time English news of two channels: Times Now and Republic TV. Love jihad is a term used to describe alleged campaigns carried out by Muslim men targeting non-Muslim women for conversion to Islam by feigning love. Triple talaq is a form of divorce that has been interpreted to allow Muslim men to legally divorce their wives by stating the word “talaq” three times. My analysis of the content, tone, and tenor of their coverage shows that these channels propagate associations between Islam and backwardness, ignorance, and violence through consistent employment of the following tropes: “Muslim women need to be saved from Muslim men”; “Hindu women need to be saved from Muslim men”; and, “Muslims are not fully Indian—they are anti-national”. I place this study of news media within the current political climate in India and briefly touch on the conversations it guides and provokes. This is a first step in detailing a problem. It is also a call for further analysis on this subject to examine and evaluate if and how discourse manipulates public conversations and policy decisions.
Highlights
When Edward Said says that he has “not been able to discover any period in European or American history since the Middle Ages in which Islam was generally discussed or thought about outside a framework created by passion, prejudice or political interests” (Said 1981), it rings true forIndia in the late 2000s, as well
Through the process that Van Dijk calls the creation of “the We-Groups and the others” (Van Dijk 1998), we examine how the media plays a role in positioning Muslims as the dangerous “other”
I began the paper with common notions of what a Muslim has looked like over the years—the media trials have reinforced that belief
Summary
When Edward Said says that he has “not been able to discover any period in European or American history since the Middle Ages in which Islam was generally discussed or thought about outside a framework created by passion, prejudice or political interests” (Said 1981), it rings true for. I shall examine how two news channels in positions of power use agenda setting, priming and framing to represent Muslims and Islam, and how these representations may not always be unbiased and objective. The minds of viewers are in Hall’s words, “impregnated with unconscious racism” towards Muslims and Islam These programs fall under the “infotainment” category and most, if not all, viewers engage with them aware of the presenters’ bias. The stereotypes they perpetrate are retained in conscious memory and often manifest in acts of micro-aggression and in extreme cases, incite violence
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