The role of the media is to inform not to bastardize the information with prejudice. The target of this perversion of the news is any report dealing with the Middle East, and more importantly, countries that have Muslim majorities or theocracies intrinsically tied with the Islamic religion.

The perpetuated use of the term “Muslim countries” has been particularly harmful in this vein. The lack of distinction made continues the idea that they are all one in the same, which is completely untrue.

Major news services are expected to report the goings on in the world and this does include the actions of Islamic-Extremists in countries like Iraq and Syria. The failure of the distinction on some level implies that conditions in the aforementioned countries are to be expected in other countries with a high population of Muslims including Indonesia and Turkey.

A scholar of religion, Reza Aslan was part of an interview on CNN which quickly derailed due to the uneducated ignorance the news anchors were projecting by frequently using the term “Muslim countries” and repetitively saying that the oppression of females in society is a fixture of every single one. Aslan went on to address that stereotype by bringing up the fact that not all countries with many followers of Islam are repressive towards women.

According to Aslan, open society for women is a norm “in Indonesia and Malaysia. It certainly is in Bangladesh. It certainly is in Turkey. I mean, again, this is the problem is that you’re talking about a religion of 1.5 billion people and certainly it becomes very easy to just simply paint them all with a single brush by saying, well, in Saudi Arabia, they can’t drive and so therefore that is somehow representative of Islam. It’s representative of Saudi Arabia.”

The lack of inclination of the media to educate the public on the intricacies of Islam as a religion as opposed to continuously using the religion and words like Muslim countries, the Taliban, and terrorists in regards to a body of people, of individuals is denying them that individuality and grouping and entire body of people with a stereotype a comparatively small number actually merit. By doing this, news services perform a grave disservice to their audience.

The fact that a term like ‘Islamophobic’ has become a common word much less a common attitude taken in this supposedly “first-world” country and in others similar shows how horrible the situation has seeped into the conscious of the mob being directed by the antics of those tasked with the role of informing them. The astonishing lack of censure towards this  in the media bias is telling of the appalling loss of skepticism and willful ignorance when it comes to what is just and right.