co-pilot of the German plane who crashed it deliberately the other day.
As the western media outlets broke the news, they didn’t forget highlighting this line: “the religion of co-pilot is unknown.”
Apparently intended objective was to make people think if he had any connections with Muslims, said Kadri Gursel, a Turkish journalist who was also panelist.
Swami Agnivesh, an Indian human rights activist, said that media tend to welcome extremist voices and play down the moderate elements thus intensifying inter-religion tension.
An Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi of Al-Jazeera America, said that her network ran the blasphemous caricatures of Charlie Ebdo in the United States. This could not have been done in Iran keeping in view its religious sensitivity there, she said.
There is more realization at public level than among journalists about the sensationalism being created through unprofessional religious coverage. Two-thirds (66.5%) of the public agrees that there is too much sensationalism in religion coverage, a view held by less than one-third of reporters (29.8%), explained Debra in light of a study conducted by an American university.
Religion is an extraordinarily complex yet religious literacy among the general population is quite low, she said. Surveys indicate, Debra goes on, the reporters covering religion in the US lack even the most basic knowledge like when the Jewish Sabbath begins, what Roman Catholics believe about the bread and wine at Mass, which religion revers Vishnu or which is the most popular days of the week and time for the Muslims to share in community prayer.
She said it is like a parable of the elephant and the blind men. “Talking about coverage of religious sensitivities is a little like trying to describe something that each of us only grasps the smallest bit of, yet we are so certain that we know the whole elephant looks like based on a small bit of the animal,” Debra explained.