Telling Muslim Stories

Has the coverage of Muslim issues damaged the trust of ordinary Muslims in the mainstream media?

BBC Radio 4's Analysis: Telling Muslim Stories, was broadcast on Thursday, 28 December, 2006 at 20:30 BST.

Read the programme transcript

This year it seemed that every time you switched on a news bulletin, there was story about Muslims.

Journalists have been covering terrorism in Muslim communities for some time, but in 2006 they took on wider aspects of Muslim culture itself - from the way some Muslim women dress to the protests over the Danish cartoons.

But has all this coverage turned Muslims off the mainstream media? And does it matter if it has?

In Analysis this week Charlie Beckett, Director of the Polis journalism think tank at LSE, asks why this has happened and explores the wider questions raised about the political and moral state of British journalism.

The avowed aim of journalists covering these issues was to further the integration of Muslims.

But some Muslim and non-Muslim voices accuse them instead of taking any signs of difference to be an act of hostility to the whole of society.

How much of this perceived bias is simply explained by the way newsrooms work?

The demands of the news cycle have meant that some mistakes have been made, and journalists have been too quick to perceive issues through the frame of a conflict between Islamic and Western values.

But could it still be the case that, despite the ferocity of the journalists' coverage, we are left with greater understanding of Muslim matters?

Part of some Muslims' objection to the Western media is that they have become too closely associated with the politics of Western governments, especially in terms of reporting of foreign conflicts that affect Muslims.

The failure to understand the impact of the Iraq war on British Muslims may also stem from a liberal coyness to probe Islamist terrorism and its sympathy for Muslim suffering - and radical resistance - abroad.

But those journalists who have probed political Islamic thought have often found themselves accused of bias and misrepresentation.

They have also had to question their own perspective and value systems in a way which few other subjects demand.

We explore whether there are indeed unconscious 'liberal' attitudes behind journalism - and ask if they could fairly be called a form of bias?

Its not only the media but many Muslim voices too who call for better and more fair-minded probing of Islamic ideas and ideologies.

We ask whether liberal journalism is up to the task and what its ethics should be in a 'post- multicultural' society.

Presenter: Charlie Beckett
Producer: Mukul Devichand
Editor: Nicola Meyrick