Orientalism and Journalism

ILIJA TOMANIĆ TRIVUNDŽA

University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Orientalism is a term most commonly used to refer to a representational strategy

that defines the Orient and its population as an “Other” in opposition to Western
civilization. Founded on a binary logic of opposing, mutually exclusive “essential
characteristics” of Us and Them, it constructs “the Orient” as unbridgeably different
and inferior to “the West.” The term’s present-day critical and pejorative connotation
originates from the work of Palestinian-American academic, cultural critic, and public
intellectual Edward W. Said (1935–2003). In his remarkably influential and highly
controversial 1978 book Orientalism, Said laid claims about the implications of West-
ern cultural and academic institutions in the processes of (neo)colonial domination
through the cocreation and upholding of a persistent discourse of Othering, which
enables the West in its continuous political, economic, and cultural domination over
the Orient. In media and journalism studies, orientalism is generally used to describe
a discursive strategy of Othering, a cluster of recurring news frames or a set of negative
stereotypes used in news reports and commentary related to events in the Middle East
(including Turkey) and North Africa.
Before it acquired its present association with exploitative power relations and
postcolonialism, the term was used to designate either a field of scholarly inquiries into
“Oriental culture” (which included the study of Middle Eastern, North African, East
and South Asian cultures, religions, languages, philosophies, histories, law, and art),
or a predominantly nineteenth-century aesthetic movement, which drew inspiration
from Oriental themes and motives, and achieved its greatest influence in painting.
For Said, orientalism is “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemo-
logical distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’”
(1978/1995, p. 2) in which the former is constructed either as sensually alluring or
as dangerous, but always as essentially different from the latter. Said further claimed
that orientalism is a post-Enlightenment discourse, grounded in set binary opposi-
tions, which are based on progressivist and historicist notions of development and civ-
ilization which consequently define the Orient not only as different but also as less
developed, backward, irrational, and morally inferior to the Occident. Said found these
binaries—which define the Occident as modern, rational, progressive and the Orient as
backward, irrational, barbaric, dangerous, sensual, exotic, even childlike—as remark-
ably enduring, homogeneous, and stable. According to Said, these historicist binaries
enabled the West to construct “the Orient” as an “imaginative” geographical entity,
a discursive construction representing not the “actuality” of the Orient but a collec-
tive fantasy about the Other, which effectively served the West to craft and imagine
its own (superior) identity. It is important to note that Said does not conceptualize
The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies. Tim P. Vos and Folker Hanusch (General Editors),
Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou, Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh and Annika Sehl (Associate Editors).
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118841570.iejs0038
2 O R I E N TA L I S M A ND J OU R NA L I SM

orientalism as a form of false knowledge in contrast to some “real,” existing Orient,

but as a Foucauldian regime of knowledge which is constitutive of power relations and
which has political implications. Said insisted that orientalist scholarship and (elite) art
and culture were constitutive parties in production of this regime of knowledge, which
enabled direct colonial domination of the Orient—and which at present still fuels both
media and popular culture representations as well as foreign policy strategies based on
sweeping generalizations about “the Arab world,” “Oriental culture,” “the Arab mind,”
“Muslim rage,” and so on.
Although Orientalism was written in the aftermath of and partly as a response to
the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, it is important to see Said’s anti-imperialist attack on
canons of literary history via other “implicated” academic disciplines as a part of a
much broader zeitgeist, of realization that after three decades of successful (armed)
struggle, decolonization was still an unfinished project—one that would remain
unfinished until political liberation was followed by a discursive decolonization. Said’s
work should be seen as part of a broader set of then-mounting demands of Third
World countries to have the right to undergo economic and cultural modernization
on their own terms and outside of Cold War bloc divisions. These included, among
others, political initiatives such as the Non-Aligned Movement and demands for a
New World Information and Communication Order in which Western dominance
of communication flows was seen as a threat to indigenous cultures and negative
media representations, resulting from Western domination of the news market, were
seen as obstacles for successful economic development. Orientalism and its quest for
alternative modes of representation was thus part of a broader subaltern search for
ways to undermine Western hegemony and disentangle modernity from capitalism.
Said was neither the first nor the only author to launch a critique of orientalism:
Anouar Abdel-Malek raised it from the perspective of serving colonialist and imperi-
alist domination over the Third World, A. L. Tibawi from the perspective of religion,
and Bryan S. Taylor from the perspective of the Marxist critique of capitalist economy.
However, none of them ignited polemics in the way Said’s work has. Dismissed by one
critic as a “work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mis-
takes from wilful misrepresentations” and described as an act of “intellectual terrorism”
by another, Orientalism was initially reproached for a number of factual errors and for
Said’s arbitrary and selective reading of the work of Oriental scholarship and of canon-
ical texts of Western literature. Both were claimed to have been abused for the purpose
of a biased political polemic rather than being used for factual scholarly inquiry.
Underlying these critiques is often an unstated epistemological and axiological
clash between Said’s postmodern/constructivist position and the modernist/positivist
position of his critics, who present the work of Orientalists for the most part as neutral,
value-free scientific inquiry. Said’s analysis was based on an uneasy marriage of Fou-
cauldian notion of discourse and the power/knowledge nexus with the Gramscian con-
cept of hegemony in order to produce a critical deconstruction of orientalism’s “false”
dichotomies and simultaneously initiate a humanist quest for alternative, nonexclusion-
ary forms of social and cultural representation. This created a set of tensions in Said’s
argumentation which he was unable to solve in Orientalism and which he only partly
 O R I E N TA L I S M A ND J OU R NA L I SM 3

addressed in Covering Islam (1981) and Culture and Imperialism (1993). These tensions
anchor the four major strands of critiques of Said’s conceptualization of orientalism.
The first strand reproaches Said for not developing the notion of hegemony as a pro-
cess of contestation, arguing that the hegemony he describes is too monolithic and
unchallenged, that colonialism is not simply a unidirectional relationship, and that Said
imposes singular meaning to cultural products rather than allowing for the possibility of
their ambivalent reception or their at least marginally dissenting encoding. The second
strand of critique focuses on his unduly exclusive focus on British and French orien-
talism and consequent insistence on a necessary link between discursive and territorial
domination; these critics highlight important bodies of orientalist knowledge produc-
tion in countries with no direct territorial colonization of the Orient, such as Germany
and Russia, and note Said’s lack of attention to the specificities of different national
and historical encounters between the Orient and the Occident, arguing that this pro-
duces a homogenous and ahistorical reading of the relationship between the two. The
third cluster of critiques accuses Said of failing to escape the binarism he criticizes, by
failing to provide a viable alternative mode of representation, by failing to recognize
that humanist projects are themselves embedded in the logic of dehumanization of the
Other, or by oversimplifying the negative reading of orientalist dichotomies by reading
them as merely fears or fantasies. The fourth strand of criticism is leveled against Said’s
unwillingness to address different class, gender, and economic positions of producers
and addressees of orientalist discourse, failing to see how the discourse worked either
as a tool for orientalizing internal (class or national) Others, how it was used as a cri-
tique of certain modern values (e.g., romantic condemnation of industrial progress),
and how it was produced and reproduced outside of the domain of high culture—in
advertising for commodification, in journalism for agitation and propaganda and in
popular culture as a means of entertainment.
It should be noted that a large number of Said’s critics do not deny the existence
of orientalism as a system of evaluative, stereotypical, and derogatory representa-
tions of the Orient, but claim that Said’s critique is in a sense misplaced, failing to
account for the two domains in which it is most frequently, vividly, and influentially
reproduced—those of popular culture and the popular press. With the exception of
authors attempting to save Orientalists from Said, such as Bernard Lewis, Robert Irwin,
John MacKenzie, or Ibn Warraq, much of the work inspired by Orientalism refined
and extended rather than straightforwardly repudiating Said’s initial arguments. In
the study of journalism, this more nuanced understanding of orientalism demands
that scholars pay more attention to the ways in which nationally specific histories and
shared cultural imaginaries shape journalistic discourses and calls for critical scholarly
attention to journalism “beyond” the news genre.
Two of the most important refinements of Said’s initial arguments for journalism
studies are that as a discourse, orientalism is not necessarily preconditioned by physical
territorial conquest and colonial possession of the Orient, and that orientalism in non-
colonial countries is not an imported but rather an “indigenous” construct employed
for discursive boundary maintenance of collective identities. This implies a multiplicity
of orientalisms (e.g., frontier orientalism, nesting orientalism) that arise from different
forms of historical encounters with the Orient, which for European countries ranged
4 O R I E N TA L I S M A ND J OU R NA L I SM

from significant colonial influence and conquest (France or the United Kingdom),
marginal territorial possession on the Oriental periphery (the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, Russia, or Spain), absence of territorial possession in the Orient (Germany,
Scandinavian countries), and even having been colonial subjects of the Orient them-
selves (large parts of former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Greece). It also implies that the
form of orientalism can change if historical conditions of the encounter change—for
example, when the Oriental Other becomes an internal rather than an external Other
through processes of migration. Subsequent work on Said’s concept of imaginative
geographies has also been important for critical studies of media and journalism, as it
pointed not only to journalism’s implication in the routine construction of imaginative
geographies in the process of its daily construction of imagined communities, but also
to the constitutive role of non-Oriental imaginative geographies in construction of per-
ceived civilizational divides and Western historicist and progressivist self-identification,
such as that of Eastern Europe or the Balkans. The refinement of the conceptualization
of orientalism as hegemony legitimized concerns about orientalist media discourse
beyond the coverage of major political events (such as the Iranian revolution or the
Gulf War) and political propaganda to nonpolitical genres such as sports, and to
non-news genres such as travel journalism or popular science, which routinely trade in
the production, articulation, and visualization of cultural differences. It also prompted
researchers to look more closely into the interconnections between journalism and the
aesthetics, style, and content of popular culture’s cinematic orientalism.
Despite Said’s early extension of his orientalism thesis to journalism in Covering Islam
(1981) and the general consensus on the existence of negative, orientalist discourse in
the news media, systematic investigation of orientalism was far more prominent and
influential within cultural studies than in journalism studies. There it repeatedly fea-
tured as a supplementary framework within studies that focused on analysis of war
journalism, political propaganda, terrorism, and so on, rather than as a primary or
exclusive focus of news research. This work within the field of media and journalism
rarely ventured beyond specific case studies or country-specific examples, resulting in
an absence of major edited volumes or seminal books offering comprehensive overviews
of the ways journalism (re)produces orientalist discourse.
Out of the two strands of orientalist othering—that of the sensual or the dangerous
other, it was the latter that has been—and remains to this day—the major focus of
research on journalism and orientalism. For the most part, this research addressed
either discursive constructions of Otherness, the framing of events in news reporting or
journalism’s (re)production of specific stereotypes and (stereo)typical imagery. It could
be argued that the difference between the three is often merely the degree of abstraction
on which orientalism is to be located: stereotypes can be conceptualized “simply” as
framing devices, while framing itself can be conceptualized “merely” as a specific strat-
egy for the articulation of discourse through defining the meaning of nodal points and
fixation of floating signifiers. Framing, in particular, offers the field’s “indigenous” and
highly informative framework for conceptualization and research operationalization of
journalistic orientalism along the lines of Saidian understanding of orientalism as “an
accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness” (1978/1995,
p. 6). From the framing perspective, orientalism emerges as a readily available, socially
 O R I E N TA L I S M A ND J OU R NA L I SM 5

shared, and persistent interpretative schemata, which promotes specific definitions,

causal interpretations and moral judgments of events or social actors through the
selection and/or exclusion of specific elements. These are drawn from a finite pool of
pre-available options, such as metaphors, images, and stereotypes identified by Said and
others, which serve as culturally shared frame packages on which journalists (but also
politicians or artists) can fall back to swiftly interpret new events for their audiences.
Since these articulations are dependent on specific (national) symbol-handlers and
audiences, research in journalism and orientalism has shown how orientalism is
neither singular nor homogenous but can differ significantly across national contexts
within which the “us” of the news audience is constructed. It has also shown how
the persistence of orientalist discourse is not the same as stasis: Orientalism’s specific
articulations can change or evolve over time without challenging the basic evaluative
grid they uphold, as is evident, for example, in the shift from the ethnic (Arab) Other of
the 1970s to the religious (Muslim) Other in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent declaration of an ongoing global
“War on Terror” are by many authors seen as a moment in which (via terrorism)
orientalism became the master Manichean binary of the post-Cold War era, com-
pleting a shift that started with the 1990–1991 Gulf War. This interpretation has been
heavily influenced by the “new barbarism thesis,” articulated initially by Bernard
Lewis and later popularized by Samuel Huntington through the idea of the “clash of
civilizations”—unavoidable global conflicts arising from incompatibilities of different
“civilizations” and their religious or cultural traits. While post-9/11 “softer” forms of
journalism, such as travel journalism, seem to continue to rely on perpetuation of the
more traditional sensual part of the orientalist binary through their treatment of food,
architecture, costumes and cultural heritage, “hard” news reporting appears to have
fully reverted to the conceptualization of the Oriental Other as dangerous Other. One
that no longer endangers the very core of Western values, freedoms, and progress from
afar, but which can now violently and effectively do so from within the West. Studies
of Western media reporting over the past two decades show how it has demonstrated
persistent orientalization in its coverage of major political events and conflicts (e.g., the
2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, the 2003 Iraq War and subsequent insurgency,
the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, the war in Syria), coverage of
large-scale terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and recent smaller
acts of “Islamic terrorism” scattered across Europe, in coverage of major political crises
(e.g., the Arab Spring of 2010–2011 or the 2016–2017 refugee crisis), as well as in minor
“domestic” stories on immigration, failed integration, crime, religious radicalization,
and the nonviability of multiculturalism. These studies indicate how the construction
of orientalist binaries remains grounded in a specific notion of modernity as an
amalgam of political rights and capitalism as torchbearers of civilization and progress.
These binaries are articulated through a series of tangible tropes, such as technological
development or women’s rights. The former, for example, has its strongest domicile in
war reporting through a visual and textual focus on the use of superior Western military
technology (complete with notions such as “surgical strikes,” “smart weapons,” and
“collateral damage”), although it is also frequently featured in everyday-life reportage
6 O R I E N TA L I S M A ND J OU R NA L I SM

and travel journalism. Similarly, the issue of women’s rights has been used as a contem-
porary variation of the “white man’s burden” and implementation of the mission libéral
démocratique. The liberation of women, symbolized through their unveiling, is a recur-
rent orientalist trope used by journalists to articulate support for military interventions
(e.g., Afghanistan) or for promotion of regime change (e.g., the Arab Spring). Recent
studies have also revealed that orientalist tropes are more readily available in and
promoted through visual coverage of events, namely through press photography and
TV footage, and are characteristic of news reports in countries as diverse as Sweden,
Spain, or Slovenia. Researchers have found visuals to be more orientalist than verbal or
textual accounts of events. This is typical also in news coverage from countries which
were not directly involved in particular conflicts (e.g., the Iraq War), and which have
significantly different economic and political footprints in the region.
Recent studies emphasize the persistence of journalistic orientalism in Western
media in spite of the visible complexity of geopolitics in the Middle East and North
Africa (conflicts between Shia and Shiite groups which challenge the orientalist
notion of the homogeneity of Islam), in spite of changes of information environment
(the greater global presence of the region’s own journalistic accounts of events, such
as those produced by the TV channels Al Jazeera or al Arabiya) and regardless of
availability of alternative, noninstitutional sources of information (NGOs, bloggers,
citizen journalists). Several authors have also used the label neo-orientalism to describe
the post-Cold War (and particularly post-9/11) variation of orientalism, noting
its increased reliance on oneself-orientalization—that is, the active role of “native”
regional experts in the articulation and confirmation of essential Otherness of the
Orient for the Western media. Another recent development, which urges reconsid-
eration of Said’s notion of the unidirectionality of orientalism, has been the active
appropriation of negative orientalist stereotypes by political movements and terrorist
groups, such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS/DAESH). The Islamic State’s
West-oriented propaganda—which studies show to be markedly different from their
internal propaganda—was based on gruesome displays (beheadings and executions)
and vivid enactments (destruction of archaeological heritage) of the crudest images
of the Oriental Other. One of the major contributions of contemporary journalism
studies to the orientalism debate has been its ability to expose both the danger of the
weaponization of (self-)orientalism and its allure of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Four decades after its publication, Orientalism—which became one of the founding
texts of postcolonial studies and has triggered critical self-evaluation in fields as diverse
as art history, anthropology, literary criticism, human geography, and history—is dated,
but by no means outdated. It continues to provoke and inspire scholarly inquiry not so
much because of the (in)accuracy of Said’s ambitious and sweeping analysis, but because
of the continued relevance of the fundamental questions it poses on our ability to repre-
sent other cultures, authenticity of experience and voice, ideologies embedded within
grand emancipatory projects such as the Enlightenment and modernism, the distri-
bution and perpetuation of social inequality, and the non-neutrality of all knowledge
production, including journalism.
 O R I E N TA L I S M A ND J OU R NA L I SM 7

SEE ALSO: Boundary Work; Framing Theory and Journalism; Terrorism Coverage;
Travel Writing; Visual Journalism; War and Conflict Coverage

References

Said, E. W. (1981). Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest
of the world. New York, NY: Random House.
Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism. London, UK: Chatto & Windus.
Said, E. W. (1995). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage (Original work published 1978).

Further reading

Irwin, R. (2006). The lust for knowing: The Orientalists and their enemies. London, UK: Allen
Lane.
Little, D. (2008). American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Macfie, A. L. (2001). Orientalism: A reader. New York: New York University Press.
MacKenzie, J. M. (1995). Orientalism: History, theory and the arts. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press.
Todorova, M. (1997). Imagining the Balkans. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Tuastad, D. (2010). Neo-Orientalism and the new barbarism thesis: Aspects of sym-
bolic violence in the Middle East conflict(s). Third World Quarterly, 24(4), 591–599.
doi:10.1080/0143659032000105768

Ilija Tomanić Trivundža is associate professor in the Department of Media Studies at

the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His research interests
span the field of visual communication, with a special focus on the social and political
role of photography in contemporary mediated communication. His published articles
and book chapters focus on photojournalism, news framing, and contemporary photo-
graphic phenomena. He is the author of Press Photography and Visual Framing of News
(University of Ljubljana/FDV Press, 2015). Ilija is currently president of the European
Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) and coedits Membrana
magazine on photography.