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If I were to ask everyone a general question of what's the identity or what's the face
of mass media today? What's a generic identity that you would describe? Oprah Rob Ford Ok
so overall, in general, if I were to ask people to describe generic personalities you might
say that the face of mass media is maybe a white person, perhaps a man, in a suit, so
from a high socioeconomic status. There are a bunch of recurring trends that you notice,
not in Oprah though. So this identity, this is kind of like the face of society. This
is kind of like what we think is normal, these are our representative or the role models
that we sort of look up to. And so we see that it's important for us to be as inclusive
as possible in this description. And we have come a long way since then. We do see a lot
of ethnic minority representation in Hollywood in particular, so Oprah like someone mentioned,
George Lopez, Ellen Degeneres these are all representatives of different ethnic minorities
in Hollywood. But there's still one ethnicity that's very underrepresented and that's our
topic for today. Would a Muslim woman make it in mass media today? Now what do I mean
by mass media? Well we all know mass media mass media is like what we see on TV, what
we see in magazines, what we see even in reality shows and sitcoms and that's kind of different
from Hollywood because it's more of a projection of what we think is real, whatever we see
on screen sort of goes hand in hand with what we think is normal in society right? And we
all know that mass media is powerful enough to shape the thoughts and views and opinions
of an entire generation. So if we look at a case study of this, back after the Civil
Rights Movement there was still a lot of racial prejudice and discrimination against African
Americans. In a way, in an attempt to sort of dispel some of these stereotypes a lot
of sitcoms came out in an attempt to do this so for example "The Cosby Show" or something
that our generation is more familiar with, "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" So these sitcoms,
they introduced us to an African American family on-screen from a high socioeconomic
status that sort of went through the same struggles that regular Canadian and American
families went through. And by seeing this, by seeing this family on screen, we were able
to sort of see all of our shared beliefs and values and we were able to empathize with
them more and as a result racism did go down and African Americans were treated in a more
respectful manner. Bringing it back to Muslims in the mass media, this sentiment is shared
by Katie Couric who is a very famous American journalist, talk show host and author. And
so, there's a new Pew Poll that was that showed that 46% of Americans viewed Islam as a religion
of violence. So why is that? Why does almost half the population of America think of Islam
and generally all Muslims as evil or violent? Well if you just turn on the TV the two main
stereotypes that are always being repeated over and over about Muslims is number one
all Muslims are terrorists and in some way, shape or form were responsible for 911 and
number two is that all Muslim women are oppressed and in need of being freed. So it's understandable
that almost half of America thinks of Islam as a really violent religion and something
that should stay in history. And so you might think that OK these sentiments are just something
that people think, it doesn't really translate into anything but we are seeing a dramatic
increase in Islamophobic and anti-semitic hate crimes right now. So for example there
was the veiled woman earlier this year in Europe who was beaten just for wearing a veil
and she lost her four month unborn child
There's the pastor in the states who coined
the "International Burn a Quran Day" on the anniversary of 911 and just general hate crimes
that we're seeing on the rise. So we do see now that prejudice is a result of stereotypes.
What's the best way, what's the most effective way to reach out to the masses and show that
this is actually not a representation of the larger Muslim population? In my opinion, I
think it's putting a figure, an identifiable Muslim figure, so a Muslim woman perhaps,
in the face of mass media to show the viewers first hand that this is not actually reality
that this is not the truth. So there have been some attempts at this but first we have
to think of if a Muslim woman were to go into this environment, would she succeed? Like
sometimes I think about it like OK if like anyone I know ever tried to actually go into
Hollywood or even apply as a News Anchor or something would they succeed? Or is that environment
very unwelcoming to a Muslim woman because would she have to then be put at a dilemma
where she'd have to sacrifice her values and her beliefs in order to move ahead? And so
I just want to bring it back to Muslims in mass media there have been some attempts at
putting Muslims in mass media so for example "Little Mosque on the Prairie" - has anyone
heard of this? OK so it was a Canadian sitcom that aired for a few seasons and there were
some mixed reviews when it first came out but generally people liked the idea they said
it's a nice idea it's introducing us to Muslims in a different light and some of the criticism
that it got also was that it wasn't that funny it wasn't that entertaining so maybe that's
why it didn't do so well but this was in Canada and I don't think it reached out to as many
people as it would have had it been an American show and so this show aired in 2011 "The All-American
Muslim" reality show - how many people have heard of this? Only like one person OK so
this aired in the states in 2011, in November 2011 so two years ago and it was a reality
show following five Muslim families in Michigan and it showed them doing regular things like
serving as a police officer, being part of the football team and just being active in
the community in general and this got crazy backlash. People were so uncomfortable with
the idea of seeing Muslims in a different light and a lot of groups wrote to the advertisers
and the sponsors of the show and they told them to pull out from sponsoring the show
because they just weren't comfortable with the way Muslims were being portrayed, they
didn't like the idea that you could be Muslim and also American and so one of the biggest
advertisers of the show which was the Lowe's hardware company actually pulled their advertising
and the show didn't even go on for more than a season. So it was just interesting to note
how a lot of groups were really hesitant in sort of reevaluating their opinions or beliefs
about Muslims because the first step of dehumanizing a group is kind of painting them as "different"
because then you don't feel as bad if you can't relate to them so you don't feel as
bad if you're not treating them equally. And so now it sort of becomes a social responsibility
if we do think it's important for media to be more ethnically representative or more
inclusive then I mean we saw with the reality show how a social push or you know different
advocacy groups do have an effect so if we do think it's our responsibility in order
to put demand and pressure because what's the main thing that media outlets care about?
They just care about our viewership, they care about our ratings so if we hold ourselves
to maybe a higher standard of viewership or values with our viewership and maybe write
letters to different groups or politicians and what not then we can move towards becoming
a more global empathetic community and becoming more inclusive so we can give a fair chance
to everyone.