This paper examines two years of articles/texts located around the concepts of ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ within Sydney's two major daily newspapers. It finds peak issues which concentrate reporting of these concepts and it focuses on language used by journalists and the meanings they carry within the texts chosen around those peak issues. It argues that a consistency of view can be found in three peak issues — the Palestine/Israel conflict, Lebanese rape trials and the arrival of asylum seekers — and that this view is an antipodean development of a Western way of seeing the Orient defined by Edward Said as ‘orientalism’.
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