Stereotyping by historicizing: The journalistic writing technique of locating foreign societies in the past

Abstract

Drawing mainly on cultural theories, this article probed the ‘myth’ in the news (international) using a combined quantitative and qualitative approach for investigation with a goal of revealing common characteristics of articles that revolve around a mythical image of a foreign culture, or a national cultural stereotype. Three major newspapers from three different regions of the world, the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan, were content analyzed and found that articles that pivot on well-known foreign cultural stereotypes invoke one of three types of theme/content: a well-known point of ancient history, a media myth built over decades, or a ‘lived’ experience of the audience. In essence, articles that utilize foreign myth are characterized by the technique of ‘historicizing’ the subject matter. They portray the culture as being embedded in history, tradition, and inertia indicating to readers that the foreign country – and collectively the world outside – has remained the same and stagnant culturally in the process stereotyping foreign societies as the Other. This article discusses the intersection of myth and national cultural stereotypes, using the concept, ‘the culture peg’ as a bridging notion that allows for a measure of quantitative method of investigation.