Faith in Media: Improving Coverage of Islam and Other Religions
Blogs from the Conference in Istanbul, Turkey: December 14 to 16

I was looking forward to this session which was titled, "What do the Holy Books really say?"  It was supposed to address the Quran scripts on the role of women and whether violence is justified in the Quran and how there can be various interpretations of the same text.  This session would have been really helpful for journalists covering Islam as there are various interpretations of the Quran and we need to address how to deal with that when covering a story on Islam.

Instead of that Kaplan chose to talk about the media's representation of Islam.  He believes that many of the journalists covering Islam have an orientalist point of view.  He advised journalists not to reduce Islam to the various issues that they are reporting on but, instead, to look at it as a whole.  He gave the example of covering women's rights in Islam without looking at the whole context.

He said that in the p ...

The four stories that were chosen for the joint reporting projects were presented and here are brief descriptions of each project:

1. The first project looks at the changes that have been made to Saudi school texts and school curriculums.  A lot media attention was directed toward the Saudi school system in order to understand the deeply rooted hatred toward the West of extremists originating from Saudi Arabia, such as Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers.  It was revealed that Saudi school texts are intollerent of other religions and at times encourage violence against the "other".  This project aims to study those changes and determine whether they have gone beyond the texts and actually changed the mindset of the students and teachers.  This project will be reported by myself and Kelly McEvers.

2. This story is about the Berbers and their fight for their righ ...

In this session two Turkish journalists, Faik Bulut and Emre Akoz, addressed the issues of secularism and Islamism in Turkey.

Bulut started by saying that he was a secularist but made the distinction between Kamalist secularism and Leftist seclarism, which he endorses.  He said that while secularism is supposed to allow the individual to practice their religion freely, Kamalist secularism in Turkey has become a religion in itself that attacks Islamic practices.

Bulut brought up an interesting point that secularism is perceived differently in the Muslim world.  He told the story of how he was once approached by a Lebanese man who asked him if all secularists were atheists.  That is a very important point because that is a misconception among Muslims, especially Sunnis.  I related to that because in Saudi Arabia we are taught that secularism can not be practiced by Muslims and there are negative connotations ...

Stephen Franklin spoke about the conference that was held in Wisconsin in 2005 in which Arab and U.S. journalists addressed the misunderstandings and misinformation that are prevalent in both U.S. and Arab media.  As a result of that conference a manual was published which aims to improve coverage of Arab and U.S. journalists.  Franklin gave examples of certain words that journalists need to be aware of when reporting.  One example is the word "martyr" which he said must be avoided unless there is a specific need to use that word.

He also addressed issues of bias among journalists and said that journalists must learn to realize that we have certain limitations that we need to be aware of.

Franklin also said that one negative aspect of American journalism when covering the Arab world is that the Arabs remain to be perceived as "the other."  He added that while there has been an increase in a ...