The veteran media critic Jack Shahen tells us 90% of Hollywood films depict Arabs negatively, reinforcing “a consistent pattern of dangerously hateful stereotypes” in his book, Reel Bad Arabs, which examined 1,000 American movies produced since 1896. An equally in-depth study needs to be conducted for television news, where the vilification and stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims has been similarly consistent.

Most recently, a shining example of this trend was the two-hour ABC news special dubbed “Heaven,” which aired earlier this month on the program 20/20, with host Barbara Walters asking: "Where is it and how do we get there?" Of course one would require a healthy imagination to think such questions could be answered in 120 minutes of Walters' interviews, many of which were clearly dug up from the ABC archives for the show. Yet the two-hour slot provided plenty of time to honor the American broadcast news tradition of promoting an Orientalist, Islamophobic narrative that paints Muslims as probable fanatics.

To answer such vague questions about our complicated views of the afterlife, Walters and her team travel the world, speaking to Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists; they look at the portrayal of heaven in movies, music and ancient mythology. They speak to priests, pastors, reverends, rabbis, televangelists, even the Dalai Lama himself. Some interviewees came off as articulate and inspiring, while others seemed rather narrow-minded or outlandish. Yet when it came to reporting the views of heaven by Muslims, viewers were offered a stark choice between a soft-spoken scholar and a bloodthirsty terrorist behind bars. 

It seemed that far more effort went into producing the latter interview than any other segment, with Walters traveling across oceans to visit an Israeli prison and meet members of Hamas.