La representació dels àrabs en els programes satírics americans.Una anàlisi multinivell

Resumen

For several years, examining the image of Arabs and Muslims reflected in the American media has been considered a rich field of research that has been tackled by many political communication scholars. The research at hand is exploring the images of the Arab and Muslim world in the American political satire shows. Through analyzing a sample of (N=116) jokes from the two satirical shows, “The late show with Stephen Colbert” & “The Daily show with Trevor Noah”. The analysis was applied on jokes that are only Arab or Muslim related jokes from (2017-2021). In addition, the research at hand relied on analyzing different social media platforms including the official pages of both shows under investigation, The Daily Show and The Late Show, on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Furthermore, a textual analysis was carried out on the first displayed comments, (N=140), on the most commented posts related to Arabs or Muslims on the social media platforms. Moreover, the methodology included a comparative analysis for the whole data gathered, both quantitative and qualitative, to assess the differences in approaches used in tackling Arab related issues in the shows. Results showed that politics and war related topics dominated the content of the sample jokes in both shows. Moreover, the most common frames used in the political satire shows, were the Issue frame being the highest frame used in both shows along with, Attribution of responsibility and Conflict frame were also frequently apparent in the sample jokes. In addition, the analysis revealed the most mentioned Arab countries in the sample jokes were Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq. The most common mentioned stereotypes about Arabs and Muslim were that Muslims are terrorists, Muslim women are dressed in black and covering their heads and men are with beards, Egypt is a country known for mummies and Saudi Arabia is a country full of princess and wealthy sheiks and a several mentions to the famous Arabian nights tales. The Social media data analysis demonstrated that, Facebook was the most popular social media platform in terms of number of fans and interaction of users across all the social media platforms. The textual analysis revealed that majority of users` comments had positive sentiment with the topics related to Arabs in their context.