Fox News Channel

Fox News Channel is cited by Edward Said as part of the US media environment that repeatedly circulated reductive images of Arabs and Muslims. Its significance in the argument is not an isolated report or a single image, but its place in a wider system of repetition linking popular media, political polemic, expert authority, and public support for power.

Place in Said’s Argument

Said groups Fox News Channel with CNN, evangelical and right-wing radio hosts, tabloids, and middlebrow journals. He argues that these outlets recycled unverifiable fictions and broad generalizations about people presented as foreign and threatening. The repetition gave familiar stereotypes renewed visibility, helping to stir public hostility toward an imagined external enemy.

This account connects media representation to political consequences. Said argues that the construction of Arabs and Muslims as fundamentally unlike Americans helped make military action against Iraq appear intelligible as a defense of freedom and values. He contrasts that rationale with the possibility that, absent this established sense of difference, the war would not have occurred.

Recurring Images of Arabs and Muslims

Said describes a shifting but persistent repertoire of popular images. In films and television, Arabs are cast in roles associated with sexual excess, dishonesty, and violence; in news images, they are commonly shown as undifferentiated crowds expressing rage or misery rather than as individuals with distinct experiences. These depictions, he argues, make Muslims and Arabs appear as a collective menace and encourage fear that they might take over the world.

The images also change with political circumstances while preserving the same reductive logic. A Princeton reunion costume planned in 1967 used Arab dress as its motif; after the June War made the motif embarrassing, the planned procession was altered to show participants with hands raised in a gesture of defeat. After the 1973 war, Said notes, cartoons increasingly depicted Arab sheikhs beside gasoline pumps, tying Arabs to the oil shortage and giving the stereotype a newly menacing emphasis.

Media, Expertise, and Public Knowledge

Said places media repetition alongside books, articles, and educational materials that present Arabs and Islam through misinformation and sweeping claims. He cites a 1975 Columbia College course guide that caricatured Arabic as a language of violence and treated the supposed Arab mind as inherently bombastic. He also describes textbooks that reduce the region’s peoples to hostility toward Israel or present Islam through crude inaccuracies. These examples show how media stereotypes are reinforced by ostensibly educational and scholarly forms of authority.

The broader institutional setting matters to Said’s account. He describes postwar American Middle East research as developing amid strategic and security interests, including government-supported programs, research agencies, and organizations such as the Middle East Institute, founded in Washington in May 1946. He argues that this American apparatus accommodated and popularized older European Orientalist assumptions. Fox News Channel belongs, in his critique, to the larger circulation of such assumptions through contemporary public culture—not to a separate process detached from scholarship and policy.

Continuity and Significance

Said argues that books and articles about Islam and Arabs often repeat polemics comparable to those of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, while popular media translate related assumptions into familiar images and news frames. The continuity is not simply that the same image persists unchanged: the Arab can be represented as a defeated caricature, a threatening oil-rich figure, a villain, or an anonymous crowd. What persists is the reduction of varied peoples and histories to a fixed collective type.

Fox News Channel’s role in the passage is therefore illustrative and systemic. Paired with other outlets, it exemplifies how repeated representations can make broad stereotypes seem like common knowledge, link public fear to political argument, and help sustain the inherited Orientalist framework Said criticizes.