Nohrstedt, Stig A. "Mediatization as an Echo-Chamber for Xenophobic Discourses in the Threat Society: The Muhammad Cartoons in Denmark and Sweden." Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse. Ed. Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik and Brigitte Mral. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 309–320. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 2 Oct. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472544940.ch-021>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 2 October 2021, 07:43 UTC. Copyright © Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik and Brigitte Mral and the contributors 2013. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 21 Mediatization as an Echo-Chamber for Xenophobic Discourses in the Threat Society: The Muhammad Cartoons in Denmark and Sweden Stig A. Nohrstedt Introduction This chapter reflects on the role of mainstream journalism in the proliferation of Islamophobia in late modern society, by analysing two cases where newspapers in Denmark and Sweden published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. Both are instances of mediated perceptions of Muslims, symbolized by the Prophet, as a threat to freedom of speech, but in rather different ways. However, together they illustrate discursive processes and opinion-building strategies used by right-wing populism in which journalism becomes both amplifier and echo-chamber due to media logic. The first case, where the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten printed a series of Muhammad cartoons in 2005, has been intensively discussed both by journalists and media researchers (e.g. Eide et al. 2008, Sundström 2009). The second case, in 2007 where the Swedish newspaper Nerikes-Allehanda published a cartoon portraying Muhammad as a toy dog, has also been studied by media researchers (Camauër 2011, Camauër (ed.) forthcoming). In both instances, the publication of the caricatures resulted in protests, violent demonstrations and death threats against the cartoonists and editors, but led to varying editorial conclusions. I will focus on certain aspects of these two cases that relate to the spin of threat perceptions as driving factors behind the publishing of the cartoons. I will argue that these cases are examples of mediatized crisis spirals typical of a new phase of late- modern society, which I label the ‘threat society’. The dual perspective elaborated is related to two analytical levels – macro and micro – which are necessary for an understanding of the media-related mechanisms that can partly explain these two cases, and also more recently, the Oslo and Toulouse mass murders in July 2011 and March 2012, respectively. Of course, the importance of the media is indirect in the sense that 1) the operative ‘rationale’ for the terrible crimes is to get the attention of 310 Right-Wing Populism in Europe the media, as explicitly expressed in Brevik’s so-called manifest, and would not have been conducted without the media, and 2) because of the nationalized framing and tendency in the media to depict some foreigners as a potential risk to the national community. The media’s role Studies of the media have shown that they play an important role in the facilitation of xenophobic attitudes and opinion-building. In the 1970s and 1980s, several analysts concluded that news reporting on immigration and refugees was constructed from a basic distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ – where immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers were depicted as risk phenomena for the national society and population. The alleged dangers included, for example, new arrivals bringing diseases, criminal behaviour, economic burdens, foreign social and moral norms; in short,‘They’ threatened ‘Our’ way of life and cultural identity (e.g. Hartman & Husband 1974, Hall et al. 1978, van Dijk 1993, European Dilemma 2005, Nohrstedt & Camauër 2006, KhosraviNik 2009, 2010, KhosraviNik et al. 2012; see also chapters by Wodak (Ch. 2), Kovács (Ch. 15) and Kallis (Ch. 4) in this volume). In some studies, a dual-media construction of immigrants has been identified with distant ‘Others’ outside national borders; for example, asylum-seekers are depicted in negative and stigmatizing terms, whereas close ‘Others’, already living in the country with neighbours and school personnel supporting them when applying for residence permits, are positively described as assimilated and grateful for the hospitality they have received in their new country (Brune 2004, Camauër 2011). Mainstream media operate within national horizons or frames, what Billig has called ‘banal nationalism’ (1995). They are institutions in the domain of the nation state, and their audience, almost without exception, is limited by territorial borders. They address their readers, listeners or viewers as citizens with an implicit national identity. In several ways this has consequences for the media as facilitators of right-wing populism (RWP) and extremism. The implied implicit ‘We’ in the media’s addresses to their audience makes every problem, risk and danger a threat to ‘Us’. If a pandemic breaks out or refugees are gathering at the borders, the media logic tends to describe this as something that ‘We’ must protect ourselves from. The inclination and incitement to focus on the problems, risks and dangers that people in other countries face, perhaps equal to our own, is far less prominent compared with this in-group perspective. These ‘Others’ are secondary in importance or even irrelevant for the direction of media attention. There are organizational and economic mechanisms behind this – the media live by attracting people’s attention, the main success factor for commercial media (see van Dijk 1993, Triandafyllidou et al. 2009, Krzyżanowski & Wodak 2009). For the ‘hot’ nationalism, for example, RWP that Billig (1995) juxtaposes with the ‘banal’ variant, the media provide a discursive environment that fertilizes their impact on the general public. As the main carrier of ‘banal’ nationalism, the media prepare and give resonance to right-wing propaganda when they point to the ‘Other’ as the problem. In this way, RWP propaganda simply makes explicit and echoes what the media logic Mediatization as an Echo-Chamber 311 implicitly and ‘banally’ implies. Further, the media’s ‘banal’ nationalism helps to cover up the RWP movement’s international character, which comes out so clearly in the contributions to this volume. The narrow national frames of media logic are obstacles to journalism that could reveal the collaboration and transnational, ‘foreign’, elements in the propaganda that pretend to protect and defend ‘Danishness’, ‘Swedishness’ and ‘Britishness’. The general lack of global, or at least transnational, news perspectives in the mainstream media, in this instance, helps the RWP to avoid being exposed before the general public in their ‘nudity’ as promoters of the national interest. The inherent ‘banal’ nationalism of the media further leaves journalists off guard when they are accused, from the RWP side, of being ‘politically correct’ and hiding the ‘truth’ about all the allegedly negative consequences of immigration and ‘multicultural’ influences. This lack of defence against RWP propaganda seems to come from a naive and superficial understanding of its strategy and rhetorical methods that this volume hopefully will contribute to remedying (see also the chapters by Andersson (Ch. 22), Pelinka (Ch. 1), Oja & Mral (Ch. 19) and Wodak (Ch. 2) in this volume). However, the institutional roots behind this professional shortcoming are first, journalists’ instinctive opposition to all kinds of censorship, and second, the accord between RWP propaganda and a media logic built on the distinction between the imagined national community and the external dangers that are threatening ‘Us’ (see also Wodak et al. 2009). Here is not the place to elaborate upon the argument above in relation to the extensive globalization literature. Suffice it to note that although the theoretical speculations about the media as a globalizing agent are frequent (e.g. Volkmer 2001, Beck 2006, Reese 2007, Eide et al. 2008, Chouliaraki 2009), others are more sceptical (e.g. Riegert 1998, Biltereyest 2001, Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2001, Hafez 2007, Kunelius & Eide 2007). Empirically based research in the field remains rare, but existing studies generally confirm that media content disseminates and promotes national frames (e.g. Olausson 2005, Östman 2009). The media’s role in connection with the cartoon cases must however also be discussed with regard to the question concerning the relationship between media content and social processes, including crises and intercultural communication processes, as well as how democratic values such as freedom of speech and religion are contested from various perspectives. The media as constitutive of the threat society Elsewhere I have described the threat society as a stage of late modernity, drawing upon the analyses of Beck, Furedi, Bauman, Cottle and Atheide (for references see Nohrstedt 2011). A threat society is marked by the expansion of a culture of fear, and of politics focusing on the management of various threats. The role of the media is central to the theory of a threat society. Mediatization explains the special role of the media in the development of a threat society. Media logic and the staging of spectacular ‘media events’ contribute to a symbolic reality which functions as a habitat where threats, crises and conflicts are broadly constructed