Times were already tough enough for <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />North America's Muslims. But the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made them harder. Television and newspapers overflowed with stories about Muslim terrorists like Osama bin Ladin. Trying to explain international Islam to the public, news media highlighted foreign dictators who imposed strict Muslim law, or sharia, on reluctant populations; cutting off the hands of thieves and forbidding women to show their faces.

In the U.S., evangelist Franklin Graham, who installed President George W. Bush, made headlines when he denounced Islam as a "wicked religion."

Many Muslims complain Sept. 11 accelerated the news media's negative stereotypes of Muslims in North America. Although some media have strived to be sensitive to the 1.2-billion-member religion, Muslim leaders maintained many media outlets still emphasize how Muslim cultures oppress women, encourage violence and oppose the values the West holds dear, such as democracy, pluralism, freedom and civil liberties.

In 2003, Canada's more than 600,000 Muslims (six million in the U.S.) are probably the most susceptible to feeling the news media are portraying them as suspicious.

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor would suggest that if Muslims' fears are accurate, it's an example of how the news media can seriously harm people, since people's identities are shaped by how others recognize them.

"People can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back a confining or demeaning or contemptible image of themselves," Taylor writes in The Politics of Recognition.

This is one of the clearest challenges facing the news media today: to do a better job accurately representing the roughly 10 million active Canadian followers of organized religions -- in all their complexity.

The second challenge for the news media is just as important, however, even though it's more subtle.

If Canadian news outlets increased coverage of religious, spiritual and ethical concerns, they would be helping develop a culture that recognizes people's innermost dreams and concerns.

At the same time, they'd be challenging a society that tends to serve the proverbial bottom line. Using Taylor's language, the news media could help people more consistently engage wider horizons of meaning.

Before looking at ways media coverage of organized religion, private spirituality and ethics could be improved, let's examine the good and bad of reporting on the subjects.
Some of the hottest stories of the past decade have been on religion: World Trade Center bombings by Muslim extremists; Taliban fundamentalism in Afghanistan; murders of U.S. doctors who perform abortions, Catholic clergy sex abuse.

But big, controversial stories don't always lead to quality coverage. The media have reported some of these stories well. Others have been handled sensationally, creating more heat than light.

Only a handful of Canadian newspapers (including The Vancouver Sun) have writers dedicated to the religion beat. Most newspapers still plug their news and religion pages with wire stories from outside their city that makes only fleeting reference to religion or spirituality.

When you consider that more people in North America attend a religious event every week than attend a sporting event, and that the news media coverage of sports outweighs religion coverage by at least 10 pages to one, there is still a big gap to explain.

Religion coverage is arguably less thorough in Canada than in the U.S., where more people believe in God and twice as many regularly attend a religious institution.

There are only about 200 full-time religion reporters in the U.S. and Canada -- meaning barely 10 per cent of newspapers on the continent (and virtually no TV networks) have reporters devoted to the potentially explosive and endlessly complex beat.

The best study ever done of the North American media's coverage of religion and spirituality came out of Chicago's Northwestern University a few years ago.

The Garrett-Medill Center for Religion and the News Media revealed that while reporting on organized religion had risen -- and was being well-received by readers and viewers -- it was still limited, and coverage of more generic spiritual and ethical issues was slim to non-existent.

In a survey of major North American newspapers, magazines and TV networks, researchers discovered pieces about religion, spirituality or values made up between 11 to 20 per cent of all stories in a given daily newspaper, weekly news magazine or television news program.

However, religion, spirituality or values were often not the primary focus of the stories. And while the researchers concluded the stories were not overly biased, they noted the stories generally failed to provide theological or historical context.

The most penetrating part of the Garrett-Medill study was the way it creatively divided religion-related coverage into three distinct types.

It had one category for "religion" (which it defined as institutionalized groups and beliefs and rituals), another for "spirituality" (pertaining to the spirit or its concerns as distinguished from worldly existence and its concerns) and another for "values, morals and ethics" (convictions people have about what is right, true and important).

The study found that less than two per cent of all stories in the news media looked at issues involving ethics.

What a loss. The study rightly pointed out that virtually any news story (regardless of whether it directly relates to religion) has a moral aspect, since it is ethical considerations that often turn an issue into news, providing tension and conflict and human interest.

I maintain most news, business or even sports stories could benefit greatly from a journalist making a call to a professional ethicist or someone else who could highlight the implicit ethical dilemmas in a news story. But it rarely happens.

As a result, we lose out on the chance to explicitly articulate moral issues relating to uses such as economic growth, gambling expansion, professional codes of conduct, welfare, environmental sustainability, parenting, biotechnology, medical rationing, the "war on drugs," military aggression and sex and violence in entertainment.

More shocking, perhaps, the Garrett-Medill study found less than one out of 200 of the stories that ran in newspapers or magazines or aired on television had a specifically "spiritual" perspective.

As Roy Larson, executive director of the project, astutely said: "Spirituality is difficult for journalists to cover. It's not hard news. It's amorphous, it's groping and it's not necessarily event-related or connected to established institutions."

Although a surge of interest in spirituality has not been lost on the publishing industry -- where books on religion and spiritual themes have been among the top-selling genre for most of the past decade, according to Publishers' Weekly -- little of that has been reflected in the mainstream press and TV.

Despite Larson's valid observations, I think one largely positive sign has been a mini-explosion in a host of women's and health magazines (such as Chatelaine in Canada) of coverage of spiritually-based practices such as meditation, yoga, therapeutic touch, Tai Chi and a host of other techniques for healing mind and body.

Some of the women's magazine writing is simplistic, overselling techniques as quick-fix answers to happiness. But some of it is thought-provoking and demanding. These women's and health magazines are proposing a world view where money, success and power are not necessarily seen as the main route to contentment.

A great deal of misunderstanding and tension exists between the news media and religious people, which is not serving the cause ofenhancing public spirituality.

If you painted an (over-)simplified picture of aliens from planet Religion, they would be trusting, respectful of authority, yearning for tranquility, resistant to worldly sins, open to the non-rational and sensitive to those who suffer.

The unkempt creatures from planet Media, on the other hand, would be skeptical, hostile to authority, obsessed with facts, wary of commitment, excited by controversy, drawn to disaster and, in some cases, at their best, sympathetic to the underdog.

On the religious side of the equation, Toronto Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic acknowledges he's trying to get used to how journalists aren't automatically impressed with his religious authority, since their philosophy is basically one of "liberal democracy" and individual choice.

As well, Ipsos Reid pollster Andrew Grenville, a Christian, says many religious people carry around a persecution complex when it comes to the media, taking every perceived slight as a reason to disengage from society. Grenville also astutely points out another reason religious people are frustrated with how they are portrayed in the media is that even those within their own fragmented denomination may not share the same beliefs.

Contrary to popular belief, however, the dearth of religion coverage at most newspapers is probably not a result of most media types being virulently anti-religious.

A University of Colorado study suggests quite a different reason the news media don't more thoroughly cover religion (as well as spirituality and ethics): They're intimidated by their complexities. The exceptions are usually the journalists who are allowed to become specialist reporters, but, as we've seen, those are few.

As a result of all these factors that conspire against quality coverage of religion, spirituality and values, many religious people are frustrated.

Catholics in Canada in the early 1990s felt fury and disgust with the news media for the way they focused on priestly sex abuse.

Evangelicals fumed about the media obsession with their leaders' financial shiftiness and their views on abortion and gays and lesbians.

And when he was moderator of the United Church of Canada, the outspoken Bill Phipps would often ask the media why it ignored his and other Canadian religious leaders criticisms of unfettered capitalism. He believed it had something to do with corporate ownership of the mass media.

Whatever the accuracy of Phipps' conclusions, most of the position papers that Canada's organized religions regularly release on public policy issues receive little or no media attention.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops in Canada, which indirectly speaks on behalf of almost half the country's population, issues statements almost every month on issues ranging from aid to welfare, free trade to protecting the environment. But they almostnever make it into the secular media.

I'd guess that if it weren't for sex-related issues such as pedophilia, abortion, divorce, sex outside marriage, abstinence and especially the explosively divisive issue of homosexuality, the number of stories on religion and spiritually-related issues would drop by almost half in North America.

What's to be gained from more comprehensive coverage of religion, spirituality and ethics?

Shahina Siddiqui, of the Ottawa-based Council on American Islamic Relations, says attempts by some journalists to show there are a range of Muslims in the world, from fundamentalists to moderates to non-observant, have helped temper the angry North American backlash to the fact Muslim hardliners were behind the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

As Gordon Legge, of Calgary's Centre for the Faith and Media puts it, the news media, in a religiously pluralistic culture, has a leadership role to play to "nurture and foster tolerance and understanding for the beliefs of people from different parts of the globe."

While this is true, it also must be added that sometimes, when you really learn about another faith group, you end up not really liking all of what they stand for. Some Jews don't like what many Muslims do or say. Secular humanists are furious that the Pope is pressing Catholic politicians in Canada to stop same-sex marriages. Orthodox Catholics don't like the sound of New Age searchers practising astral travelling or aboriginal religion.