In the grand scheme of things after the awful events that are sometimes called 9/11, a handful of journalistic errors about Muslims or their faith may seem trivial.
Given the magnitude of the terrorist strikes, who really cares when a technical term gets mangled, a statistic botched, or a name misspelled?
Why, it happens all the time in daily papers and not only in references to Islam, a few journalists will say. What do you expect when history is written on the run?
Trust us to get it right the next time, they add. Think of the bigger picture.
To a large extent, those arguments are probably right – especially the one about the bigger picture.
In general, it’s true that during the last month, The Star has taken care not to demonize law-abiding Muslims in Canada for the actions of a few far-away criminals who hijack a global religion.
Notably, the day after the suicide attacks , The Star ran a photo of Muslims at the Islamic Foundation mosque in Scarborough, praying for the thousands of dead and injured, like many other Canadians.
That set the tone.
Since then, much more space has been devoted to telling stories of Muslims, Sikhs and others whose skin colour or appearance – the hijab, beards, turbans – makes them convenient targets post-9/11 of hatred, abuse, and in some cases, violence.
Those stories have been buttressed by the simple fact that Western leaders have identified the enemy here as criminals, not Islam.
Only six years ago, media outlets blithely quoted anonymous U.S. authorities who, wrongly, suggested the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was the work of Mideast terrorists.
In the current circumstances, there hasn’t been the same unfair stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs that prompted those communities to begin monitoring “anti-Islam” content in the news media a few years ago.
But let’s go back to those nagging errors that can creep into news coverage and chip away at credibility, particularly with Muslim readers.
Shortly before the U.S.-British air strikes on Afghanistan, The Star reported that a meeting of 1,000 Islamic scholars and clerics, convened at the behest of the Taliban, had recommended that fugitive Osama bin Laden be asked to leave the country.
The conclave was described as sharia. Not so. In fact, the right word is shura. The Encyclopedia Britannica says the word broadly refers to “consultation” in Muslim states. It can be a council of state, advisers to the sovereign, a form of parliament, even a court of law with jurisdiction over claims against the government.
By contrast, sharia is “the fundamental religious concept of Islam, namely its law, systematized during the second and third centuries of the Muslim era (A.D. 8th-9th century).”
The same news story claimed the world has 1 million Muslims, as opposed to the 1.2 billion figure usually cited in The Star. A reportorial brain cramp the editors didn’t catch.
A third mistake worth quibbling about is the common misspelling of names that are unfamiliar to English-speaking journalists.
Recently, it happened to Mohamed Elmasry, Canadian Islamic Congress national president and one of Canada’s most prominent Muslims.
When a Star columnist realized what a mess he’d made of Elmasry’s name, he apologized in print. Classy.
But why, you ask, would a news ombud be fussing and fuming about these relatively minor problems when the paper is clearly trying hard to get the big picture right?
It’s simple, really. The big picture only becomes clear when you get the small stuff right.
