Media Islam images derive from geopolitical experts, not academic scholarship

Evidence

Large segments of the intelligentsia allied to the community of geopolitical strategists together deliver themselves of expansive ideas about Islam, oil, the future of Western civilization, and the fight for democracy against turmoil and terrorism. For reasons that I have already discussed, the Islamic specialists feed into this great stream, despite the undeniable fact that only a relative fraction of what goes on in academic Islamic studies is directly infected with the cultural and political visions to be found in geopolitics and cold-war ideology. A little lower down come the mass media, which take from the other two units of the apparatus what is most easily compressed into images: hence the caricatures, the frightening mobs, the concentration on “Islamic” punishment, and so on. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 160

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The hierarchy of knowledge production here — strategists, specialists, then media compressing into images — parallels the chain by which trees-as-infrastructure or sacrifice narratives flatten into stereotype; illustrates how a knowledge apparatus selects what becomes visible.

Related

• Islamic studies’ marginality lets media spread racist caricatures unchecked (similarity 0.84)
• Every portrayal of Islam is an act of willed interpretation, not a description. (similarity 0.83)
• Media output is uniform despite the abundance of sources and outlets. (similarity 0.83)
• Media coverage reduces Arabs and Muslims to oil suppliers and potential terrorists (similarity 0.83)
• Media coverage of Islam systematically obscures Western actions against Muslims (similarity 0.83)
• Understanding Islam’s coverage requires demystifying the power-knowledge link (similarity 0.82)
• Academics are neutralized into status symbols by the coverage system (similarity 0.82)
• A small anti-Muslim expert clique dominates US media coverage of Islam (similarity 0.82)
• The Islamic world increasingly learns about itself through Western-produced images (similarity 0.82)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.81)
• Media portrayals of Islam perpetuate hostility rather than convey understanding (similarity 0.80)
• Media coverage of Islam succeeds through political influence, not accuracy. (similarity 0.80)
• Said judged Western media coverage of Muslim executions as worse than the executions (similarity 0.79)
• Media and political elites may have an interest in promoting the Islam-violence stereotype. (similarity 0.79)
• The reified notion of Islam has hindered rather than helped understanding of Muslim societies (similarity 0.79)