Selective journalism

Media are focusing more itensely on religion these days, but very selectively. They’ll show and tell some things, but not others.

Here’s an interesting juxtaposition:

A series on atheism is about to air this week on PBS.

Conservative Christians are criticizing a plan by Public Broadcasting Service stations to begin showing later this week a three-part television documentary series on atheism, calling it “demagogic and propagandistic.”

“This series is about the disappearance of something: religious faith,” British producer and narrator Jonathan Miller says at the start of “A Brief History of Disbelief,” which was originally shown by the BBC in 2005. “It’s the story of what is often referred to as atheism, the history of the growing conviction that God doesn’t exist.”

Is atheism growing?

During the first hour-long episode, Miller visits the site in New York City where the Twin Towers stood before terrorists destroyed them on 9/11.

“The spectacle of September 11 is a forceful reminder of the potentially destructive power of the three great monotheistic religions [Christianity, Judaism and Islam] that have dominated the world one way or another for nearly 2,000 years,” the author asserts.

As the post below states, that’s a very dangerous and distorted moral equivalence. And it goes further…

“You only have to travel a few miles from New York City to find yourself in the middle of a country which is – far from being the secular world which was deplored and attacked by the Islamic fundamentalists – is in fact intensely Christian and therefore in its own way, of course, is just as religious as the Muslim world that attacked it,” he adds.

The “just as religious” equivalence is false and loaded with implications. Who’s behind this propaganda?

Miller interviews several leading atheists and examines “theories regarding the psychology of religious belief,” according to a description of the episode provided by the American Humanist Association (AHA).

AHA. Of course.

So if this airs, why did Corporation for Public Broadcasting refuse to air one particular documentary on Islam as part of a series on religion?

Since 9/11, many of us have wondered: Where are the moderate Muslims? If they are out there, why are we not hearing more, and getting more help, from them in the fight against our common foe — the totalitarian Islamists?

In recent weeks in this space, I have chronicled the saga of an effort to answer that question. It took the form of a 52-minute documentary I helped produce for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s “America at a Crossroads” series. The film, entitled “Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center,” features compelling stories of anti-Islamist Muslims who have had the courage to stand up to co-religionists who are using faith to accomplish political ends.

The documentary makes clear why the moderates are not more in evidence. Observant Muslims who dare to challenge the Islamists over ideological agendas pursued in the name of religion are shown being subjected to ostracism, intense coercion to conform and, in some cases, death threats. As long as these anti-Islamist Muslims are rightly seen as isolated, vulnerable and powerless, it would be foolish to believe that many of their co-religionists will want to emulate them.

Such a conclusion is especially likely to the extent that fence-sitting moderate Muslims perceive those repressing the anti-Islamists to be what Osama bin Laden calls “the strong horse.” The success of organizations supportive of the Islamists and of their efforts to exploit real or perceived Muslim grievances and civil liberties to create “parallel societies” in Western democracies will, inevitably, attract more adherents to the former’s ranks.

Unfortunately, what has happened to “Islam vs. Islamists” can only compound this perception. The Public Broadcasting Service and its Washington flagship station, WETA, refused to air this film. While a number of explanations have been given for that decision – including demonstrably false claims that the documentary was not submitted on time, was too long, was unfinished, the officially stated reason is that it was: “flawed by incomplete storytelling, a limited focus that does not adequately corroborate the film’s conclusions, and a general lack of attention to the obligation of fairness, which requires that viewers have access to additional context and relevant information about a complex subject.”

What? Let’s hear more about that “obligation of fairness.”