In the view of the latest worldwide events related to the YouTube broadcasting of the movie “The Innocence of Muslims” and the protest encompassing many Arab countries along with banning of the movie in some Arab (and non-Arab) countries, it would be most proper to discuss the portrayal of Muslims in television and online media by means of referring to a number of scholarly research works dealing with the subject. The paper was targeted at discussing five research papers, one exposing the issue under examination in the light of American media, one in the view of German media, one of Canadian media, together with two more overall looks at the problem in two papers by Canadian researchers. Their theses, research methods and conclusions are discussed and compared, and inferences are made with regard to the best research program amongst the five papers analysed. It is argued in the paper that the work by Niyozov (2010) has the best research program on the basis of its time and evidence range and is most constructive in that in focuses on the positivity of the solution rather than the negativity of the problem.
Rothenberg (2011) in her work “Islam on the Internet: The Jinn and the Objectification of Islam” contrasts two websites IslamOnline (www.islamonline.net) together with Islamica (www.islamicaweb.com), portrayed correspondingly as ‘‘elite’’ and ‘‘popular’’ websites. She argues that accounts of the jinn on the Internet indicate that information about Islam on-line must be double-checked, considering the fact that the two internet sites tended to be quite distinct discussions about religion and, did not appear to considerably overlap in a direct manner: they did not present the similar language, structures of reference points, or types of content material. They did not cross-reference each other, or indicate the counterpart's impact in nearly in any manner. Thus the need of filtering information on Islam present on the web is highly relevant.
Sharify-Funk (2009) in her paper “Representing Canadian Muslims: Media, Muslim Advocacy Organizations, and Gender in the Ontario Shari’ah Debate” examines a remarkably public discord involving two Islamic non-profit agencies, the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) against the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), as it was covered in Canadian papers as well as web sites. Here we see a similarity with the previous work in that the author uses the tool of contrasting two units, in this case two organizations, to arrive at a conclusion about the representation of Islam in the media. Similar to Rothenberg, she identifies another crystallizing process as to what true Islam is. However, in this case, the process she determines is not more of a purification of one whole, but more of a media-induced polarization between a “majority Muslim” lifestyle in search of a safe area inside Canadian culture as opposed to the “dissident Muslim” heritage trying to accumulate outside assistance to transform the existing conditions.
In contrast to the previous works, Powell (2011) in her paper “Framing Islam: An Analysis of U.S. Media …