I recommend Valentino’s ghost, a 93-minute film by Michael Singh released 13 May 2013 and that I chanced to see yesterday in Detroit on PBS/WCMU. It shows how media stereotyping of Arabs in the US media interacts with US foreign policy especially since the seventies. Since 2001, things have gotten worse and it has become socially, psychologically, and even legally okay in the US to stereotype Arabs and Islam. One of the surprises: to hear Walter Cronkite manage to say a sentence or two, when commenting on the terrorist attacks of the seventies, on the context.

Here is the summary provided by www.imdb.com:

The documentary exposes the ways in which America’s foreign policy agenda in the Middle East drives the U.S. media’s portrayals of Arabs and Muslims. The film lays bare the truths behind taboo subjects that are conspicuously avoided, or merely treated as sound bites, by the mainstream American media: “Why do they hate us?” “Why do we hate them?” What were the events that led to the 9/11 attacks? What are the politics behind the U.S.-Israeli relationship? Why is there a robust debate about these subjects in Europe, the Arab World and in Israel itself, but not in the U.S.? Valentino’s Ghost provides a fresh inquiry which challenges the media’s daily barrage of rhetoric and misinformation about our complex and vital relationship with this part of the world.

Many of the people interviewed for the film are well known if not sufficiently heard: John Mearsheimer, Robert Fisk. Michael Singh. It is semi-favorably reviewed by the NYT.