You learn something new everyday, they say, and there are times that one begins to swear by maxims such as that.

I was to be the opening speaker at the seminar on “Fairness in Religious Reporting” at the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo and in the rush of things accepted the assignment. I realized with chagrin later that this would be one brief presentation for there was very little to say; the case was made, the media was biased and liberal, they disliked religion and they veritably despised Islam. What had I done? Bound by my word and berating myself liberally for not learning to say no I started to gather information, just as I had been trained to do in my residency.

The Yahoo! search engine has become quite the lifesaver. It is just what Goldilocks ordered for it is not too detailed nor does it give you too few search results. I don’t Google for the result is overwhelming. Using key words and phrases like “ fairness in religious reporting” and “media bias” I would go through a few of the results every day and after reviewing what was applicable developed 33 Internet pages of material.

I concurrently went on Amazon.com and read excerpts of the various books that came up with the search and ordered Lies and the Lying Liars that Tell Them by Al Franken and What Liberal Media by Eric Alterman. The former I would classify in the must read category; it is very engagingly written and was a great eye-opener for me in this quest.

A college education serves to not just teach the science at hand; it hones in on developing the student’s skills of deductive reasoning. One of my opening slides alluded to this concept: that after reviewing the data presented and using the process of deductive reasoning the audience would arrive at the same conclusion that I had come to.

Al Franken in “Lies and The Lying Liars that Tell Them” names some of the mainstream media that is not liberal. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, Time and Newsweek made his list in that they at least try to be fair. In what he calls the right-wing media, Fox News tops the list of the likes of Washington Times, The New York Post, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and talk-radio. Their bias is clear-cut and comes complete with an agenda.

All the way back in 1988 in a book titled Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Noam Chomsky and Marcus Hermann write that contrary to popular opinion, the media is neither left-wing nor independent in its coverage of important events. They make the case that “through various mechanisms that operate within a free market economy, a certain filtering of news coverage takes place, so that what gets covered, and how it does so reflects the interests of right-wing think tanks, big corporations and rich individuals - in a phrase - moneyed interests”. What is interesting is that this book was written way before 9/11. Needless to say after that fateful day America has lost all sense of perspective in its rush to smoke out terrorism.

365 day archives of the New York Times in 2000 revealed that 124 items were written on the religious right and two items on the religious left. In the same study The Washington Post tallied a 104 versus 0 score.

FAIR or Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting in December 1999 reported that media gullibility over the previous 20 years had allowed the Religious Right to project far more power than it actually had. Credulous journalists reported that Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition had 1.7 million members but postal records showed that only 300,000 get the magazine. Jeff Cohen, founder of FAIR, asks a valid question: is the dearth of investigative inquiry due to guilt that secular journalists feel or the fear of being labeled “Christian bashers”?

Besides this unwitting projection afforded the religious conservatives, FAIR also details how they get to communicate with millions of Americans on media that they own and control. Over 1300 Christian broadcast stations, which are 10% of all radio and TV stations, many cable TV platforms and radio networks like James Dobson’s “Focus on the family”.

The mainstream media affords public access to the Religious Right by frequently interviewing its advocates, namely Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, Oliver North and Cal Thomas. They have been logged as being the most frequent guests on shows like Nightline.

In all this the Religious Left appears to have been missing in action. Historically, the Religious Left has been the leading force in all American movements for peace, economic justice and human rights but it is near absent in mainstream news. A 1993 study of religion coverage on network TV by the right-wing Media Research Center concluded, “ With a handful of exceptions the religious left went unnoticed and uncovered by the networks”.

Jeff Cohen eloquently separates myth from reality: It is a widely held belief that secular mainstream media are hostile to organized religion. The fact is that the coverage is often so embarrassingly soft that it appears to be pandering to believers.

It is difficult to determine why exactly it is that Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report have had dozens of cover stories on religious themes, primarily Christianity, in the last few years. Americans, it was reported a few years ago, were suddenly trying to find God and a meaning to their lives. Do these Christian themes cater to this quest or are they again the unwitting show-casers for the Religious Right? According to FAIR journalistic codes of balance were often jettisoned; for example in the Time article on “Does heaven exist” not a single naysayer was quoted.

Back in 1999 Cohen of FAIR wrote what is now subject for frequent debate: “One religious group that can legitimately complain of recurrent bias is followers of Islam. On talk radio Islam is denounced as a ‘violent religion’ - while terrorism ‘experts’ falsely declare that Islamic religious doctrine sanctions genocide.” He goes on to deal with the sorest issue amongst Muslims today: “Mainstream journalists report on terrorist incidents with a matter of fact reference to ‘Islamic violence’ but would know better than to speak of ‘Christian’ or ‘Jewish’ violence.” Interestingly after the Oklahoma City bombing the New York Times speculated on possible Islamic culprits, in part because “the city is home to at least three mosques”.

According to Cohen if there is a group that gets a worse shake than Muslims it is non-believers, though he wrote this in 1999 and perhaps after 9/11 no one gets quite the treatment that Muslims do. In an NBC report on the disappearance of Madelyn O’Hair, Tom Brokaw said that “she had the dubious distinction of being America’s most outspoken atheist” and this was followed by a sound byte from a Christian evangelical: “If she is indeed dead she is burning in the fires of hell”. Christian fundamentalists also believe that Catholics and Jews will burn in hell and yet it is difficult to imagine NBC quoting a similarly fundamentalist Christian upon the death of the Pope or a famous rabbi.

In the attempt at being fair and balanced I reviewed the ultra-right as well. There’s the famous Bill O’Reilly who did not just support the war in Iraq, but also recommended devastating bombing of civilians in Iraq, Iran and Libya. His chilling (or red-hot) quotes: “Let us bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble and destroy power plants,” and “ let them eat sand”. His crowning glory remains his interview with Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian professor at Florida University. Soon after 9/11 O’Reilly interviewed, intimidated, belittled, cross-examined and convicted Al-Arian on The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, NBC and Clear Channel radio whipped up such a frenzy that Al-Arian was fired from his tenured professorship despite a storm of protests, and now sits in sub-human conditions in a maximum-security prison, his diabetes untreated and his lawyer inaccessible to him.

Next in the ultra-right parade is the “blonde bombshell” Ann Coulter. Al Franken calls her “the hysterical diva of the reigning right”. Some of her pearls: “Let’s invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” and “ we need to execute people like John Walker to physically intimidate liberals”. She has labeled Hillary Clinton “dim-wit” and “bird brain”. Eric Alterman in What Liberal Media talks about the rewards for Ann Coulter’s fundamentalist ranting for she has had appearances on Crossfire, Today, Good Morning America, Hardball and many others. Additionally, she has been lovingly profiled in Newsday, NY Observer and the New York Times. ,And then there is Fox News’ Hannity and Colmes described most appropriately by The Nation as “an inexhaustible platoon of talking heads that attracts a fierce plurality of cable viewers”. Alan Colmes is to be the representative of the left, but he either does not get a word in edgewise with Hannity’s vituperation or else as Al Franken has labeled them it is as Fox news has planned it: HANNITY and Colmes.

David Croteau of the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Sociology and Anthropology in a paper in 1998 reports that the liberal media myth is funded by conservative rhetoric that highlights personal views of journalists rather than news content. The fact however is that most journalists have a centrist view.

Surveys also show that it is not journalists but their sources that express their views. The typical sources are government officials and business representatives for economic policy issues. Consumer advocates and labor representatives are at the bottom of the list.

The most quoted sources for news analyses are The Heritage Foundation and The American Enterprise Institute, which are rightwing and The Brookings Institute, which is centrist. Left-wing think tanks are almost invisible in mainstream media.

Corporate sponsors don’t just advertise they influence reporting as well, for major commercial media by the force of economics must yield to corporate preferences. Journalists challenge this off and on but generally adapt to the norm if they are to themselves advance.

National Public Radio is funded by the government and by its listeners. Charlotte Ryan of the Boston College Media Research and Action Project examined its transcripts and showed that NPR tilted toward government officials and conservative think tanks for news sources and analyses.

FAIR analyzed 40 months of Nightline programming between 1985 and 1998 and found that if you were a white male member of the government, military or corporate establishment you had the highest chance of being a Nightline guest. Also, that certain public-interest viewpoints like the peace movement, consumer rights and labor were never aired.

Public Broadcasting System’s McNeil-Lehrer Newshour when analyzed by FAIR revealed an even greater conservative tilt than Nightline and its exclusion of public interest leaders is a sad commentary on public TV.

The Nation reports in 2002 that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has a pervasive influence on the media. The corporation owns 26 TV stations, including the meteoric Fox News, has majority ownership in seven more and owns the NY Post as well as some European papers.

Clear Channel is the world’s largest chain of radio stations and the tactics of its owners remind you that George Orwell in 1984 was not just meandering down Fantasy Lane. Clear Channel in October 2001 put out a list of songs that they “suggested” not be played for the duration of America’s war on terrorism. The list is long but the prominent songs are Imagine by John Lennon, Bridge over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel, and any song by Rage Against the Machine, a band that extols justice and seeks revolution. To think that this is happening in the bastion of free speech is a very difficult pill to swallow.

In September 2003 columnist Eric Margolis paid tribute to Christiane Amanpour saying that she broke a taboo of silence and ignited controversy when she was asked about the US media’s Iraq coverage for she said “the press was muzzled and the press self-muzzled, and television was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News”. Fox News immediately accused Amanpour of being a spokeswoman for Al-Qaida. Margolis himself says that the US media was muzzled and he experienced it firsthand on US TV, radio and in print. “Never in my 20 years in media have I seen such unconscionable pressure exerted on journalists to toe the government’s party line.” He goes on to say that much of the US media post 9/11 has come to resemble the Soviet media and that the White House Press Corps and Fox News treated Bush and his entourage with the same “sucrose adulation and servility” that the state media lavished on Comrade Brezhnev.

After all the research I stand corrected about media bias. There is bias but towards the right, which is much worse than my misconception about it being liberal. For what does evangelism and fundamentalism lead to but myopia and imbalance?

Two entities make up the media’s mind: the government and corporate sponsors. The President’s campaign coffers see generous endowments by Falwell and company. His predilection is clear and so are his policies that hardly take into account the indisputable fact that the Muslim bloc vote brought him to office. Corporate sponsors are known to watch the bottom line and not be unduly concerned about peace and justice. So the prognosis of fairness in religious reporting remains rather poor. Actually it’s not poor, for the foreseeable future, it’s downright dismal.

(Mahjabeen Islam is a physician practicing in Toledo, Ohio. Her email address is mahjabeenislam@hotmail.com)