The Italian Muslim: these unknown? TV Coverage of Muslim immigration

Abstract

Immigration is becoming one of the main issues daily covered by television but, how do mass media tell us the story of the immigration phenomenon? And, particularly, are they able to hold their own role of spreading knowledge? Or are they rather supporting stereotypes and prejudices for winning the audience competition? The hypothesis of this research is that nowadays most of the Italian television programs are not able to give a complete and broad image of the Muslim world because they tend to highlight its most negative aspects, so reinforcing the idea of an existing and clashing dichotomy between the Italian culture and the Muslim one. According to this approach, Italian TV news is actually going far from its own original role of information and rather closer to become a mean for diffusing and reinforcing prejudices. Goals of this analysis are to look at how some popular Italian talk shows and news programs represent Islam and Muslim immigration, and to reply to the following questions: “Which are the programs that cover mostly the Muslim world and which themes do they address? Which is the Muslim imaginary created by these TV shows?”.