Channel 4 has been accused by Roman Catholic priests of favouring Islam and denigrating Christianity in its programming output. Now, for all I know, Channel 4’s head of religious broadcasting, the Muslim Aaqil Ahmed, may be a part of an international conspiracy to establish a new worldwide caliphate. But I rather doubt it.
For one thing, predominantly liberal media organisations are not naturally prone to appoint religious bigots to senior positions. Indeed, they are more likely to be ill-disposed to the appointment of people with strong religious convictions at all.
But that is not to say that there isn’t a problem. Religious prejudice may be in the eye of the beholder, but it is currently seen everywhere, particularly in favour of Islam. The charge against Channel 4 comes just days after the BBC was also accused of pandering to Muslims by Sikh and Hindu leaders.
This latter charge is particularly absurd. The BBC’s head of religion is Michael Wakelin and he’s a Methodist. On his watch, the BBC has produced last Easter’s epic The Passion and is about to embark on an entire dramatisation of the Bible. Before anyone counters that this demonstrates a pro-Christian bias, the BBC is also set to broadcast Around the World in 80 Faiths. How pluralistic is that?
As for Channel 4, if it has by some quirk of its personnel policy appointed a Muslim fundamentalist bent on undermining western Christendom, then he is not only a poor broadcaster for the job, but also a poor Muslim. The Qu’ran is clear about Islam’s respect for the Christian story.
The problem is not senior broadcasters talking their own religious book, but a much broader issue of the Western media’s reluctance to criticise Islam. Religions such as Christianity and Judaism, or Hinduism and Sikhism as the complainants to the BBC show, are far more likely to be mocked or censured.
This may be born of fear of Muslim militancy. But I doubt it. Journalists have not been reluctant historically to lay into terrorist organisations such as the IRA. Today, Melanie Phillips is hardly pusillanimous in what she writes about Islam. Rod Liddle, in the current edition of The Spectator, calls Muslim terrorists “narcissistic, adolescent halfwits”.
More likely is that most other media people, consciously or otherwise, give Islam a free pass in their coverage. This partly will be because chattering-class sophisticates with university degrees want to distance themselves from the bovine cabbie’s view that all Muslims are bent on the destruction of civilisation as we know it.
But it’s mainly born of a lazy and rather silly view, most regularly propagated by communities secretary Hazel Blears, that a greater degree of attention and tolerance must be expended on Muslim youths, because otherwise they are in danger of being radicalised. As the intelligence services know but this Government persists in denying, that view is just plain wrong.
I don’t suppose that the BBC and Channel 4, or any other media organisation for that matter, mean to be as babyish and patronising as Ms Blears when it comes to resisting criticism of Islam. But it is as well for us all in the media to be vigilant.