Did Media Devote Too Much Attention to Quran Burning?

(Sept. 9) -- The Rev. Terry Jones has about 50 members in his church, but his bully pulpit is much, much larger.

News of the preacher's plan to burn the Quran on Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, dominated the 24-hour news cycle. It sparked fears of violence and prompted public figures ranging from President Barack Obama to Angelina Jolie to speak out against the act. Jones announced this afternoon that he was calling off the event, but said later that he was rethinking the cancellation.

Jones, 58, has enjoyed an almost endless amount of media coverage in recent weeks, despite the fact that he is clearly on the fringe. The leader of a small, radical church in Gainesville, Fla., he is the author of a book titled "Islam Is of the Devil." Before his anti-Muslim stance was publicized, he lived in obscurity.

Some are questioning whether the media have amplified a hate-filled message, playing into the pastor's hands by devoting so much attention to an isolated event clearly meant as a provocation.

The Associated Press addressed the concern today when it sent a memo to its staff announcing that the news agency would not publish images or audio that specifically shows the Muslim holy book being burned. The AP said it would devote only one major news story a day to the Quran burning, an event the news organization described as a "proposal by a tiny group that may or may not happen."

The memo also noted that "AP policy is not to provide coverage of events that are gratuitously manufactured to provoke and offend."

Fox News had also said it would not cover the Quran burning, if it happened.

"We do not cover every flag burning that happens in this country, we don't run every hostage tape," Michael Clemente, senior vice president at Fox News, told The Baltimore Sun today. "If we tried to cover everyone who wants us to stick a camera in front of them, we'd run out of cameras pretty fast each day. But this is really about just using some judgment."

And at the Council on Foreign Relations Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked reporters not to cover the event as "as an act of patriotism."

But Joel Brinkley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former New York Times reporter, says the Quran burning would be a newsworthy event that must be covered.

"When you have the president of the United States and the top military commander in Afghanistan speaking out on the issue, it is newsworthy," Brinkley said in a phone interview with AOL News today. Earlier this week, Gen. David Petraeus warned that the burning could endanger U.S. troops, and Obama condemned the planned event as a "recruitment bonanza for al-Qaida."

But Brinkley also said news organizations like the AP are right to pause before they devote too much attention to people like Jones.

"As a journalist, you don't want to give attention to a firebomb thrower any more than you have to, but I think this has catapulted beyond this particular man's misguided action," he said. "It's a world issue."

A number of journalists and media experts said controversy involving Islam has proven to be a particularly difficult topic for the American press to cover. In 2005, for example, when a cartoon depicting Islam's Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper sparked violent protests, the American press shied away from publishing the image.

Brinkley, who teaches journalism at Stanford University, said the AP probably did the right thing by deciding not to publish images of the Quran burning event. But he said that decision should not be made out of fear.

"It's sort of sad that we are in a position where we feel threatened by a faith and cannot publish relatively innocuous material without fanning the flames and causing a violent backlash," he said.

The AP and Fox News are not alone in their predicament. Twenty years ago, the "responsible" press may not have covered such an event with such fervor. But with the Internet adding extra fuel to a 24-hour news cycle, the story isn't likely to simply disappear.

"Ten or fifteen years ago, you needed the AP and the major news wires to get images out. But now, Jones' organizers and people who sympathize with them will be able to put images on the Web. So it's going to be available," Mohammad Bazzi, a New York University journalism professor and the former Middle East bureau chief for Newsday, said today.

His colleague Mitchell Stevens, a New York University journalism professor and the author of "A History of News," said he was worried about the media self-censoring.

"This is an ugly event, one that we wish would disappear. But the news is often filled with ugly events. All sorts of things are done by people to get attention -- shootings, suicides, bombings. Do we stop covering them for this reason?" Stevens asked.

"My first responsibility is to tell people what newsworthy things are happening in the world. And this is, for better or worse, a newsworthy thing happening in the world."