الفهرس 
Media Influence on the perception of minorities
Stereotype TheoryOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The American people are now acquainted with stories of Arab and Muslim women, thanks to their persistent recurrence in the US media. Many of the representations characterize Muslim women for the American readers as an ―Other‖: different, exotically mysterious, sometimes oppressed and backward compared to American women. Through Critical Discourse Analysis and van Dijk‘s Ideological Square framework, the current study detects discursive linguistic structures employed in newspaper articles from across the USA that intensify these negative representations in the period between 2001 and 2011. The analysis reveals the hidden ideology of US versus THEM when portraying the various aspects of Arab and Muslim women‘s lives in relation to perspectives such as Hijab, terrorism and empowerment. The present analysis confirms the use of the strategy of positive selfrepresentation and negative other-representation in US newspapers which has led to polarization between the in-group (American people) and the out-group (Arab-Muslim women). Therefore, the results of the analysis conform to Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism which denotes that the West perceives the Orient as a different ―Other.‖ The analysis also draws attention to the journalistic conventions that create the negative stereotyping of Arab-Muslim women. By doing so, the present study is a broad endeavor to reveal the hidden ideologies in the US newspapers‘ representation of Muslim women in the period post 9/11. Key words: Critical Discourse Analysis, Ideological Square, Orientalism, US versus THEM, post 9/11, Arab and Muslim women, USA newspapers.