Homeland is brilliant drama. But does it present a crude image of Muslims?; Observer, 10/13/12

Peter Beaumont, Observer; Homeland is brilliant drama. But does it present a crude image of Muslims? : "How we portray the "other" – those whom we fear or are suspicious of – reinforces cultures of conflict. In some respects it has always been thus. The author and journalist Robert Winder detailed in his book Bloody Foreigners how Charles Dickens, in creating the character of Fagin for Oliver Twist, refashioned a real social problem. The boys' "rookeries" were run by Italian gangmasters in Clerkenwell's Little Italy, but in keeping with contemporary suspicion and hostility to Jews Dickens made Fagin Jewish – something he later regretted... Stuart Hall, the cultural theorist who has examined the phenomenon of "reception theory" as applied to televisual media – building on the work of Hans Robert Jauss in the late 1960s – has argued, indeed, that the messages in television drama "intersect with the deep semantic codes of a culture and take on additional, more active ideological dimensions". In other words, television drama such as Homeland not only reflects cultural and social anxieties at any given time, it reflects back those anxieties, reinforcing and shaping them. Crucially there is strong evidence that counter-stereotypical fictional depictions in popular culture may have a positive impact, with some arguing that it can help turn around prejudicial attitudes."