September 12 - Should the Media Treat all Religions as Dangerous Ideologies?

The media often investigates new religions such as scientology, but the old established ones from the Middle-East have been fighting for over 1000 years. The home of the two faiths, the Middle-East, is still in turmoil because of disagreements between them and the monotheistic originator, Judaism.

Even though most of the wars in the world involve the established religions, their right to exist is never questioned. Instead, the media usually cover the wars in an episodic manner, with each war treated as a separate entity. Shanto Iyengar and Adam Simon described episodic news coverage as focusing 'on specific events,' while 'thematic coverage is broader in scope and refers to the policy debate, historical background, or possible political consequences.

Iyengar had explained in a previous book that: 'the dominant episodic news frame illustrates what some media scholars and critics have termed the "hegemonic" model of public communication.In this model, the dissemination of information is considered part of an elaborate "code control" process through which existing power structures are maintained.

Citing Iyengar's work, W. Lance Bennett has called for more thematic reporting: 'In an ideal world, the present information system could be replaced with perspectives that were more institutional, analytical, historical and reflectively critical in orientation.'

Bennett sees the main problem with episodic news as being how it fragments events into discrete episodes that confuse larger patterns and trends.

James Curran also considers that the current media environment undermines intelligent and rational debate, as it tends to frame news issues as: 'simplified, personalised, decontextualised, with a stress on action rather than process, visualisation rather than abstraction, stereotypicality rather than human complexity.'

The next episode in the long running religious wars saga is probably just around the corner