“The media coverage of Islam is based on full of biased reports against Islam.” Such a ‘sharp judgment’ is based on western journalists’ reporting on Islam and a common concern among intellectuals and academics as well as journalists in the Muslim world. There was a conference entitled ‘Faith in Media: Improving Coverage of Islam and Other Religions” between 14-16 December at the Marmara Pera Hotel in Istanbul. The conference organized by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), based in Washington, was aimed at assembling journalists from the Western and Muslim worlds to discuss the media coverage of religion, but particularly Islam.

Yusuf Kaplan, Emre Aköz and Faik Bulut also made presentations on media coverage of Islam with journalists from the USA and Muslim countries. Although it was a well-thought conference with good intentions and a great opportunity to discuss what the western journalists miss when reporting on Islam, discussions were centred on the freedom of press in Muslim countries and theoretical side of news reporting as well as the western public approach, manipulated by the media, to Islam, and the main problem was, I believe, once again missed.

The argument that “not all Muslims are terorists” and “We Muslims are the same as you westerners” is nothing other than behaving apologetically. It is certain that there are people acting violently in the name of Islam, but to define these people as ‘radical Muslims’ or ‘Muslim terrorists’ contributes indirectly to the image that Islam is a violent religion. Any violent act carried out by non-Muslims groups such as IRA or ETA would be under the headline ‘IRA violence’ or ‘ETA violence’ rather than referring to their religion.
I am not suggesting that journalists should use the terms such as ‘Christian terrorists’ or ‘Jewish terrorists’ in the news coverage, but avoiding to use these terms when reporting about non-Muslim violent groups is a clear indication of media bias against Islam.

Even in the ‘main stream’ Turkish media, sometimes harsher than the western media, terrorism is linked to Islam and the terms ‘radical Islam’, ‘Muslim terrorists’ in the news coverage is used more often than the western media. It is also noteworthy to mention that while western media makes self-criticism, as seen at conference organized by ICFJ, Turkish ‘main stream’ media, as Emre Aköz rightly defined, acts like tourists over the issue of religion and they do not want to have an understanding of Islam.

Readers may ask the question about the Muslim media bias against the West. Well, Danish Masood, from the UN initative the Alliance of Civilisations, gave a great presentation based on newspapers research both from the Western and Muslim worlds at ICFJ conference and stated expressly how media from the western and Muslim worlds have commonalities in showing bias against each other.