The Business of Pop Culture
Pop culture can be described as a set of beliefs, objects, and practices that are by and large recognized by society as prevalent or dominant. Historically, pop culture is a sort of movement whose main objective is to give a voice to the masses via different types of media. Examples include magazines, television, books, movies, music, fashion, and sports. This direct relationship between pop culture and media has given media the power to shape people’s lives, from how they think to how they dress, eat, talk, and interact with others. While the power that media has in influencing people’s lives is massive, it has consequences when the information presented creates a false and negative picture of something or someone. This is evident today with cancel culture.
The Pop Culture Artifact: News Networks
While many have benefitted from the impact of pop culture, some communities have always been on the short end of the stick regarding how they are represented in the media. A perfect example of such a community covered here is the Muslim community. An artifact of pop culture that tends to create a lot of negative bias towards Islam is news, for example, a popular American news network known as Fox News (http://video.foxnews.com). News networks are programs that provide information and breaking news on important local and global matters. Examples of trending news involve politics, business, weather, and entertainment. News networks help us keep up to date with the world around us. News networks are expected to have democracy in their process and ensure that whatever information they present to the masses is fair and true. Traditionally, news networks have been the principal window for most Americans to keep themselves informed. Therefore, these programs are very significant in conveying information to the public and influencing their decision and opinion-making.
Taking into consideration the news networks’ capacity to frame, portray, and distribute information to Americans, the design of how Islam or Muslims are depicted is very crucial to the everyday lives of the Muslim community. With such responsibility, one would assume that news networks would be democratic, fair, and reliable. However, this is not the case today; most news networks are known to be biased and rather prefer producing news that brings in more views from the public. Accordingly, Merolla & Zechmeister (2018) found that people not only pay more attention to bad news, particularly about security threats like terrorism, but also seek out such information. As such, in a capitalist society, news channels will be compelled to seek and focus on news that brings as much attention to their platforms as possible. Since the September 2001 terrorist attacks, Muslims have been placed at the center of the stage when it comes to terrorism. Even with fewer attacks from Muslim extremists, the community is still receiving more negative attention (Lajevardi, 2021). With more negative attention being brought to this community, it is obvious that more negative opinions will continue being made about them by the public.
Negative Stereotypes of Islam in News Networks
Violence
Most, if not all, news about individuals from the Muslim community is linked to some terrorist attack or investigation. Besides, some of the terms used to describe Muslims include radical, barbaric, culturally backward, supportive of terrorism, religious fanatics, irrational, militant, and extremist, among many others. Lajevardi (2021) states that most news networks tend to incline toward bad news from the Muslim community, and good news rarely makes it to the news. With only bad news being broadcast about a few individuals in a group of people, the public will eventually believe that the whole group is bad. The same case applies to Mexicans, and most news is about illegal immigrants or drug cartels and drug substances from the country. One of the main reasons that such news from these minority communities tends to be highlighted is that most politicians also exploit them in their efforts to get into office (Jardine & Stephens-Dougan, 2021). In addition, most news channels unknowingly and carelessly propagate the wrong idea that the religion proclaimed by extremist Muslim groups is the same religion that all Muslims believe in. This creates the stereotype that Islam is a violent and revenging religion that does not tolerate other religions, and people who do not know better tend to fear being in the presence of Muslims (Døving, 2020).
Oppression of Women
One of the most prevalent stereotypes of the Muslim community is that they have anti-feminism views that oppress women. An example is the hijab, which has been the topic of many discussions, with many claiming that the hijab restricts Muslim women from dressing however they want. With little to no contact with the Muslim community, the public would never understand why the women choose to dress the way they do. Contrastingly, no questions are raised about Catholic nuns who dress up conservatively because of their faith, but it’s seen as a problem when Muslim women do it. Since most people have exposure to the Catholics and their beliefs, they tend to understand. Agreeably, extremist Muslim groups enforce anti-feminist beliefs on women, but this only applies to the extremist group communities, something the news fails to highlight. According to Døving (2020), studies have shown that news tends to present Islam as a political problem that requires solutions. With such a point of view on a minority community, eventually, every other aspect of their lives, from fashion, music, and food, among others, will also be criticized.
Role of Pop Culture in Propagating Negative Stereotypes
As mentioned above, pop culture helps create the culture and plays a significant role in the public’s opinion. As such, any idea about a group of people, whether good or bad, is propagated in pop culture; this eventually leads to the formation of generalized beliefs about the said group, popularly known as stereotypes (Najm, 2019). In this case, if pop culture always portrays Muslims as violent and a religion that should be feared, it will lead to many negative stereotypes about Muslims.
Nevertheless, some ways can be used to correct these harmful views. For one, news channels should be regulated by independent bodies to ensure that there is democracy in the information they present to the public. Also, policies should be used to ensure that people make well-informed and responsible decisions and opinions rather than being led by misinformation and ignorance. Finally, the media should be given the mandate of fair and equal representation of all citizens.
Redesigning News Networks
As mentioned above, one of the best solutions to help eliminate stereotypes towards Muslims and other marginalized groups is by ensuring there is democracy in all news networks. This would mean that news would not seek out and overly report on incidents that are known to get a lot of audiences so that they can earn more money. Instead, news channels should focus on all problems equally. Secondly, even if terrorism from extremist Islam groups was a significant problem, news networks should be mandated to responsibly report the information and not use misguided information that paints the whole religion as the enemy as opposed to a few people.
According to the informational influence theory, individuals tend to be neutral about issues but always change their opinions to favor the side that provides more information about their argument (Cho & Chan, 2021). This is exactly what happens in pop culture when it comes to Islam. Besides, many movies about terrorism always have a Muslim character as the villain; in fashion and matters of feminism, many debates attack the Muslim dress code to be oppressive to women, and the news regularly portrays Muslims as the bad guys in America. This is only a one-sided argument in this story, and we never get to hear the other side. As such, pop culture should embrace more approaches to giving Muslims a platform to be heard. Islam should be given a chance as much as other religions like Buddhism and Christianity have been given to be taught to other people. Such efforts would help eliminate all the misconceptions and separate the Muslims, the majority who are good, from the few who are bad; just like in all communities, for example, white supremacist groups are separated from other non-racist white people.
Additionally, news media should not paint Islam as an evil religion just because extremist groups use some of the Quran’s writings to justify their actions. This is the same as how white supremacist groups like the KKK use the Bible to justify their racist actions, but the media does not paint Christianity as a bad religion due to the evil actions of a few (Ortman, 2018). Moreover, the danger of a single story should be applied when covering terrorism and how the conflict between America and countries in the Middle East, like Afghanistan and Iraq, began (Teman, 2019). In America, the story about terrorism does not include the atrocities that America has committed in these countries, killing thousands of innocent civilians (Ing & FRSA, n.d.). Such stories would create a perspective on why terrorist attacks happen. The picture painted is that only one side is evil, but the truth is both sides are evil and are at war. Lastly, there is little to no presence of the Quran in pop culture. The idea that Islam is a bad religion would be debunked if the Quran was researched, studied, and common in pop cultures like movies, music, and novels.
References
Cho, V., & Chan, D. (2021). How social influence through information adoption from online review sites affects collective decision-making. Enterprise Information Systems, 15(10), 1562-1586.
Døving, C. A. (2020). Muslims are…. Contextualizing Survey Answers. I H. Christhard & M. Vibeke (Red.), The Shifting Boundaries of Prejudice. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press (Universitetsforlaget).
Ing, E., & FRSA, F. C. F. C. (n.d.). A Tale of WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.
Jardina, A., & Stephens-Dougan, L. (2021). The electoral consequences of anti-Muslim prejudice. Electoral Studies, 72, 102364.
Lajevardi, N. (2021). The media matters: Muslim American portrayals and the effects on mass attitudes. The Journal of Politics, 83(3), 1060-1079.
Merolla, J. L., & Zechmeister, E. J. (2018). Threat and information acquisition: Evidence from an Eight Country Study. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 5(3), 167-181.
Najm, N. A. (2019). Negative Stereotypes of Arabs: The Western Case. The Indian Journal of Social Work, 80(1), 87-114.
Ortman, O. (2018). Finding Meaning in the Flag: The KKK Era.
Teman, E. (2019). The power of the single story: surrogacy and social media in Israel. Medical anthropology, 38(3), 282-294.
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Question 
For this assignment, select an artifact that, in your opinion, unfairly creates a negative bias or promotes a negative stereotype about one population of society. The pop culture artifact can be a media source (song, movie, television program), a product, or other tangible associated with pop culture. Provide a link to this artifact (or an image). Explain why you have selected this artifact and why you feel that this creates a negative bias. Describe how you would re-design or re-write the script of this artifact to change the way others would view this population.
The Business of Pop Culture
In your paper:
Provide a specific link to the pop culture artifact used for this paper or an image of the artifact.
Discuss the artifact in depth. Explain the stereotypes or biases that you see being perpetuated in the artifact.
Discuss the role of popular culture in communicating harmful or incorrect stereotypes or biases. Using the concepts, terminology, and ideas within Units 1-7, recommendations for how people can identify and correct views that are incorrect or harmful.
Re-design or re-write this artifact to change the way others could view this population without the negative bias. Be sure to support this revised artifact with factual examples of the culture.
In your essay:
Be sure to structure your essay with an introduction paragraph that includes a thesis statement, well-organized supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion that reiterates the main points of your argument.
Your argument should be supported by reputable research cited in APA format both in the body of the paper and in your references section.