Does the BBC Favour Muslims?
Last Updated on Thursday, 11 September 2008 19:02
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BBC ‘favours’ Muslims … or so says the Daily Telegraph. In a report by Ben Farmer on 8th September 2008, it was noted that Hindu and Sikh leaders had complained over the ‘disproportionate number of programmes … made about Islam, at the expense of their own faith’. Statistics gleaned from the BBC’s Religion and Ethics department claimed that since 2001, the BBC has made 41 programmes on Islam, 5 on Hinduism and 1 on Sikhism.
While this reveals a considerable comparative over-concentration on Islam, whether it amounts to ‘favouring’ Islam and Muslims is, of course, another question entirely. The starting point for the statistics (2001) might be taken to suggest not so much a desire to understand Islam as a religious system, as to situate Islam and Muslims within the usual ‘frame’ of issues having to do with security, ‘otherness’ and threat.
Of course, it would be of tremendous benefit to have a wider and deeper understanding of all the main religions through the medium of television. However, the limitations of the debate are indicated through the scant nature of the statistics. How many of these programmes about Islam were to some degree hostile? We are not told. It is unlikely that leaders of other communities would be comfortable with the same degree of microscopic and often critical scrutiny. Overall, however, what the report seems to teach us is not so much – in the misleading word of the title – that broadcasters ‘favour’ Muslims, but rather that a quantitative, rather than qualitative view of religious coverage does not take us very far.
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written by Amena Saiyid , January 06, 2009
It's interesting to note that BBC has more programs on Muslims; however, what percentage of these programs actually talk about Muslims in a positive light and how many of these are looking at the links between Islam and terrorism..
its not how many programs BBC airs on Muslims, but how it portrays Muslims that should matter.
written by Madeline , September 30, 2008
Peter Morey is right to question limits of the data, and what – if anything – such bare figures can tell us of the ‘quality’ of the programmes the BBC produces on Muslims, the nature of their ‘bias’, or the image of Islam they may promote.
Some programme-makers see the BBC’s output of an apparently greater ‘quantity’ of material featuring Muslims as an indication not so much of a bias toward or against Islam, but rather a consciousness of the need, as part of its public-service remit, to ‘inform’ its audiences: to respond to contemporary events and developments which they may find ‘threatening and destabilising’, including the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims and aspects of radical Islam.
Last year's Newsnight investigation into a Policy Exchange report on “The Hijacking of British Islam” might be seen to illustrate this apparent desire to ‘inform’ working in favour of Muslims, resulting as it did in Jeremy Paxman's direct challenging of the think-tank’s Research Director about the genuinness of ‘evidence’ which Policy Exchange had claimed proved that extremist literature was on sale at dozens of British mosques. Yet it might also be argued that the programme also contributed to a fetishisation of Muslims, entertaining as it did viewers' desires to probe the inner sanctums of radical Islamists apparently operating at the heart of Britain. Would Sikh and Hindu leaders really welcome such intrusive investigation into their own places of worship, whether conducted out of journalistic principle, to promote a ‘wider and deeper understanding’ or – more sensationally – to engage audiences in an exposé of the clandestine activities of an ‘other’ faith?
Elsewhere, while individuals such as Indarjit Singh consider Sikhs ‘brushed aside’ by the BBC (in quite what sense it is unclear), popular Sikh writer and broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli is established as a regular voice on Radio 4’s Front Row. While departmental statistics indicate a lesser number of features have been produced on Hinduism than Islam since 2001, the marriage of a well-established Hindu character to Ambridge’s parish priest divides the predominantly Christian community of its daily soap, The Archers. The inclusion or omission of individuals of a specific faith and their concerns is, inevitably, the result of a host of programme-making considerations (continuity, audience demand, contributor availability, in addition to the specific requirements to ‘entertain’, ‘inform’ and reflect ‘cultural diversity’). To what extent it can therefore be claimed that BBC productions indicate a clear bias towards one particular faith certainly remains in need of much more than statistical analysis.
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