Said judged Western media coverage of Muslim executions as worse than the executions

Evidence

In 1981 Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world appeared. In this book Said returned to the attack on Orientalists, but he paid more (hostile) attention to the press and television, especially to their coverage of the American hostage crisis in Iran and the execution of a princess in Saudi Arabia. It was typical of his style of thought that he seemed to find Western coverage of the execution more reprehensible than the execution itself. The general drift of the book was to argue that Western society did not face a significant threat from terrorists of an Islamic fundamentalist persuasion. The real danger in the encounter between East and West arose from Western misrepresentations of Islam. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 552

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in how intellectual elites weight representation vs. violence; also echoes the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme of media moral panics.

Related

• Media coverage of Islam systematically obscures Western actions against Muslims (similarity 0.82)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.81)
• Press singled out Islam while ignoring identical views among Israeli religious authorities. (similarity 0.80)
• Western discourse reduces all Muslim societies to a single malevolent essence (similarity 0.80)
• Media portrayals of Islamic terror exploit pro-Israel sentiment to demonize all Muslims (similarity 0.80)
• Western press praised illiberal Christianity but blamed only Islam for violence. (similarity 0.80)
• The Islamic world’s genuine problems complicate any simple narrative of victimhood (similarity 0.79)
• Media Islam images derive from geopolitical experts, not academic scholarship (similarity 0.79)
• Media coverage reduces Arabs and Muslims to oil suppliers and potential terrorists (similarity 0.79)
• Every portrayal of Islam is an act of willed interpretation, not a description. (similarity 0.79)
• Said’s Rushdie defense contradicted his own critique of representation (similarity 0.79)
• Understanding Islam’s coverage requires demystifying the power-knowledge link (similarity 0.79)
• Westerners encounter Islam only through pre-framed political and media channels. (similarity 0.79)
• Western commentators ignored religious politics in Israel and America while condemning Iran’s. (similarity 0.79)
• Western press deplored Saudi censorship while ignoring Israeli press restrictions. (similarity 0.78)