Editing Media bias (section)

== Religion ==
The [[Satanic panic]], a [[moral panic]] and episode of national hysteria that emerged in the U.S. in the 1980s (and thereafter to Canada, Britain, and Australia), was reinforced by [[tabloid media]] and [[infotainment]].<ref name="Hughes">Hughes, Sarah (2017). "American Monsters: Tabloid Media and the Satanic Panic, 1970–2000." ''Journal of American Studies'', 51(3), 691–719. {{doi|10.1017/S0021875816001298}}.</ref> Scholar Sarah Hughes, in a study published in 2016, argued that the panic "both reflected and shaped a cultural climate dominated by the overlapping worldviews of politically active conservatives" whose ideology "was incorporated into the panic and reinforced through" tabloid media, sensationalist television and magazine reporting, and local news.<ref name="Hughes" /> Although the panic dissipated in the 1990s after it was discredited by journalists and the courts, Hughes argues that the panic has had an enduring influence in American culture and politics even decades later.<ref name="Hughes" />

In 2012, ''[[The Huffington Post|Huffington Post]]'', columnist Jacques Berlinerblau argued that [[secularism]] has often been misinterpreted in the media as another word for atheism.<ref>{{cite news |author=Jacques Berlinerblau |date=2012-07-28 |title=Secularism Is Not Atheism |url=https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacques-berlinerblau/secularism-is-not-atheism_b_1699588.html |access-date=2013-02-04 |work=Huffington Post |quote=Secularism must be the most misunderstood and mangled ism in the American political lexicon. Commentators on the right and the left routinely equate it with Stalinism, Nazism and Socialism, among other dreaded isms. In the United States, of late, another false equation has emerged. That would be the groundless association of secularism with atheism. The religious right has profitably promulgated this misconception at least since the 1970s}}</ref>

According to [[Stuart A. Wright]] in 1997, there are six factors that contribute to media bias against minority religions: first, the knowledge and familiarity of journalists with the subject matter; second, the degree of cultural accommodation of the targeted religious group; third, limited economic resources available to journalists; fourth, time constraints; fifth, sources of information used by journalists; and finally, the front-end/back-end disproportionality of reporting. According to Yale Law professor Stephen Carter, "it has long been the American habit to be more suspicious of{{snd}}and more repressive toward{{snd}}religions that stand outside the mainline Protestant-Roman Catholic-Jewish troika that dominates America's spiritual life." As for front-end/back-end disproportionality, Wright says: "news stories on unpopular or marginal religions frequently are predicated on unsubstantiated allegations or government actions based on faulty or weak evidence occurring at the front-end of an event. As the charges weighed in against material evidence, these cases often disintegrate. Yet rarely is there equal space and attention in the mass media given to the resolution or outcome of the incident. If the accused are innocent, often the public is not made aware."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Wright |first1=Stuart A. |date=Dec 1997 |title=Media Coverage of Unconventional Religion: Any "Good News" for Minority Faiths? |journal=Review of Religious Research |volume=39 |issue=2 |pages=101–115 |doi=10.2307/3512176 |jstor=3512176}}</ref>{{Secondary source needed|date=November 2024}}{{Undue weight inline|date=November 2024}}