This paper reports on the first stage of a research project on German university students’ conceptualization of Arab women and to what degree it is influenced by the latters’ representation in the Western press during the Arab Spring. It combined discourse analysis and corpus-linguistic approaches to examine the relationship between lexical items employed by the students to express their attitudes toward Arab women and those featuring in news headlines about them published in British, American, and German news media. Results display that the portrayal of Arab women in Western news headlines has a clear impact on German students’ opinions of them.