Newspaper headlines, photographs and text create impressions — impressions that become troublesome when they create or reinforce stereotypes about groups of people.
Three such stereotypes surfaced in last week’s Courant in different contexts.
`Muslims Gear Up To Fight’
Despite many articles in the past month about the need not to generalize about Muslims around the world, a headline on the front page Friday reported that “Thousands Of Muslims Gear Up To Fight U.S.” The headline with the continuation of the article was just as misleading: “Muslims Ready For Ground War.”
The Combined Wire Services report out of Pakistan centered on some Afghans and Pakistanis who might join a battle against the United States in Afghanistan.
The radical fundamentalists aligned with Osama bin Laden, as The Courant has reported on numerous occasions, do not reflect mainstream Islam as it is practiced in most of the world nor most Muslims.
Headlines, especially on Page 1, should heed the caution of the newspaper’s own reporting and not confuse all practitioners of a religion with a radical minority in specific places who are choosing to fight.
Women and War
An article on the Life cover Tuesday focused on two U.S. television correspondents now working from Pakistan. Headlines proclaimed that “Women Face Cultural Barrier In Reporting On The War” and “A New Glass Ceiling” in covering the U.S. retaliatory strikes in Afghanistan.
The article focused on Ashleigh Banfield of MSNBC and Amy Kellogg of the Fox News Channel and what they have decided to wear to work in Pakistan. Banfield, meanwhile, has changed her hair from blonde to brown for this assignment, the article noted.
The article may have left the impression that these modern television reporters are among the first women to cover war, or to adapt to cultures whose expectations of women differ from this country’s. (Also, there must be more to the professional abilities of these journalists than the color of their hair and what they decide to wear on assignment.)
American women have reported from overseas since Margaret Fuller covered the 1840s revolutions in France and Italy. Martha Gellhorn met, and married, Ernest Hemingway while covering the Spanish Civil War, then went on to cover World War II, Israel’s war of independence and the war in Vietnam.
Female journalists have adapted to work in the Muslim world for decades. Oriana Fallaci sat down with Yasser Arafat, King Hussein and the shah of Iran in the early 1970s. Foreign affairs writer and columnist Georgie Anne Geyer claims to have been the first Westerner to interview Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, in 1973; the Ayatollah Khomeini consented to an interview with her five years later. Judith Miller of The New York Times has followed the rise of militant Islam in nearly 20 years of reporting from the Middle East. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour has covered wars all over the globe, sometimes wrapped in a head scarf.
If there was a glass ceiling, or barriers that could not be overcome decades ago, these women never knew it. Their work and accomplishments probably helped make Banfield’s and Kellogg’s assignments possible — and were needed, as context, for the cultural challenges confronting today’s journalists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The `Reality Of Diversity’
The front-page centerpiece of last Sunday’s Courant was an article about demographic change in West Hartford and the racial diversity at Conard High School. The continuation of the article was accompanied by a large photograph of a pregnant student and her Puerto Rican boyfriend under a headline that noted the “Reality Of Diversity.”
“Is that what diversity is all about? Pregnancy?” asked a Newington reader.
More than a third of today’s students at Conard High School may be nonwhite, but few of its students go to school visibly pregnant. The photo and headline gave the impression that pregnancy and school integration are related.
These examples are aberrations in the way The Courant usually portrays Muslims, women and the realities of a racially diverse society. One way to guard against making such unintended generalizations is to call attention to them when they appear.
