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media s pa ce, p olitical c ontr ol, and cul tural r esist ance | 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 on e Media Space, Political Control, and Cultural Resistance Minority (Mis)Representation and the Rise of Minority Media When looking at the literature on media and minorities, one notices a clear trend in the attention paid to this relationship that may be helpful for understanding the communicative behavior of the Arab community in Israel. At the initial stage, most studies that analyzed the social, political, and cultural roles of the media focused on its function in social change, mobilization , and control. Neither the liberal-pluralist nor the critical-Marxist, the analytic strategies dominating the scene, paid sufficient attention to social diversity, disparities, and conflicts between social groups as they played out in the media.1 Since the 1960s, especially with the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States, more attention has been given to the representation of various social groups in news outlets.2 Under the influence of constructivist theories of identity formation, theorists realize that the media plays a central role in the construction of social identities and feeds into social conflict.3 As a consequence, the representation of various social groups in the media occupies a rising number of scholars.4 Furthermore, the role of the media in shaping the ways in which people look at their social reality is the focus of many studies.5 As a result, the lack of representation of minority groups or the stereotyping of these groups in mainstream media has been targeted as a major source of inequality and an important factor in maintaining social disparity.6 A growing number of scholars seek to demonstrate the relationship between minority representation in the media and racism, discrimination , and marginalization.7 Lack of equal representation and stereotyping of minorities has been a central strand in media studies, something that has only recently been taken up by the Israeli academic community. 12 | the arab public s pher e in is rael Only in the 1990s were questions finally raised regarding the role that the media plays in constructing social identities and shaping ethnic relations in Israel. Ella Shohat was a pioneer in pointing out the role that cinema plays both in suppressing Oriental Jewish identity and in colonizing the minds of Oriental Jews with an Ashkenazi Zionist worldview.8 This trend was later expanded to include the role of the media in establishing social hierarchies and in symbolically eliminating the Israeli social and geographic periphery , emphasizing instead the metropolitan centers.9 Despite the fact that the marginality of the Arab minority and its stereotyping in the Israeli Hebrew media have begun to draw some attention, this attention is still insubstantial and lacking in rigorous theoretical grounding. The marginality of Arabs in mainstream Israeli media is being described rather than explained. Little attention has been paid to the major reasons behind such marginality, something that requires more historical and empirical attention. The history of the Israeli media and the role played by the state in shaping the placement of the Arab minority in Israeli society and polity needs to be considered in order to provide a convincing explanation for the communicative behavior of the Arab community. The following study is located within the context of state-minority relations in order to shed light on the historical and political factors that explain Arab communicative behavior, especially the strategies chosen to deal with the marginal and negative representation of Arabs in Israeli media. In recent decades, the study of patterns of media consumption and of consumer satisfaction with media content has become a highly developed field of research.10 The increasing power of the media to shape public and political agendas, coupled with a massive increase in the avenues of transmission , has raised questions concerning media consumption, particularly its significance in societies composed of culturally, ethnically, and nationally diverse groups. The relationship between media culture and sociocultural diversity is one key to understanding political dynamics in multicultural societies.11 The influence of the newspapers people read, the radio stations they listen to, and the television networks they watch has become immense. The factors affecting media consumption patterns in general and the impact of media consumption in particular...

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