Bias in Popular Culture

THE POWER of VISUAL and LINGUISTIC NARRATIVES

BIAS IN popular culture is one of the most effective strategies to win over hearts and minds and shape public opinion. This book shows that public opinion and popular culture do not grow organically but are significantly shaped and manipulated, using fear and emotion, to generate consensus and exert political and social influence. Whether covert and deceptive or open and transparent, the campaign of persuasion in the modern context is sophisticated, intensifying, and has become almost universal with the rise of social media and digital technology. In this vividly told and richly illustrated study the author examines the machinery used to inform public perception, rooted as it is in a historical context which reinforces the framework of contem- porary understandings and engagement. Mechanisms and tactics employed include the use of symbols, metaphors, stereotypes, and slogans operating through linguistic and visual narratives in fiction, art, films, plays and political satire to promote desired worldviews. Passive consumers, unable to detect the interplay at work, follow the path of illusion and ultimately internalise the bias.

“An essential text for exposing and confronting the curse of Islamophobia.” 
Dato’ Seri Anwar bin Ibrahim 
Prime Minister of Malaysia 

“The author shows clearly that much anti-Muslim bias and distortion is propagated through popular culture. It generates fear and loathing of Islam and Muslims, promotes prejudiced policies rampant in Western nations, and fosters intolerance. For people to live together peaceably while respecting their differences, they must recognize and then address the harm caused by such fiction.”
Professor Charles E. Butterworth
Emeritus Professor, University of Maryland, USA

“Timely and insightful, Bias in Popular Culture offers a creative, ambitious and critically important look at Islamophobic bias through the world of culture: art, photographs, children’s books, cartoons, popular fiction, television and film. Sweeping in scope and depth, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the everyday roots of contemporary forms of racism and exclusion and the range of places where we might engage more creatively in interventions to address them.”
Professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss 
Director of the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, Professor in the School of Public Affairs and in the School of Education, American University in Washington, DC, USA 

“This study is hauntingly revelatory about the irresistible appeal of evocative images of fantasy narratives to the darkest prejudices of a target readership, especially during times of turmoil and deep insecurity. Such scurrilous appeal to the basest instincts of frightened and disoriented communities eclipses rationality and provokes violence against imagined enemies. In the end, it is more damaging of the communities who buy into these scare stories than the imagined enemies, as we have seen in Europe of the 1930s and today’s deja vue.” 
Professor Abdelwahab El-Affendi 
President and Provost, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar 

“This important study brings the discourse of popular culture into even sharper focus. Popular culture nourishes the soil where Islamophobic intellectual and academic discourse can grow, flourish and find support from a large segment of society.”
Professor Ziauddin Sardar
Director of the Centre for Postnormal Policy and Future Studies, UK

“This is a must-read for creating greater awareness of the self in the broader systems of influence. By dissecting the unseemingly political, the study exposes how technologies of governing the ‘self’ lead, en masse, to hatred and fear of the Other. Through painstaking research, the author unveils how these technologies have evolved through political theatre, Nazi propaganda, and the historical use of derogatory art. “
Dr. Wanda Krause 
Program Head of the MA in Global Leadership and Assistant Professor
 in the School of Leadership Studies Program, Royal Roads University, Canada