Page 170 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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by journalists in hopes of diminishing revenge attacks. Spyer suggests that
instead of helping to end the violence, this dislocation of the identifiable
religious publics from the reality of corpses piling up made it easier for
violence to be perceived (and enacted) as mysterious and anonymous (Spyer
2006: 160).
With the best will in the world, media homogenization of religious publics
for the good of the larger public can backfire. However, the best will in the
world is seldom the only one in play: While encouraging national unity, Amar
Chitra Katha makes money, and sanitizing the sometimes violent history of
India almost certainly results in more sales. John Bowen suggests that French
media have found it lucrative to publicize the threat of Islamisme:

The viewing and reading public encountered one exposé after another
about the breakdown of ... mutual respect in schools, hospitals, and
towns. The shock value of these exposés helped increase magazine sales
and television audiences, and made a few books instant best-sellers.
(Bowen 2007: 163)

Bowen writes that former President Jacques Chirac read one of these
bestsellers, The Lost Territories, and that it influenced his advocacy of the
law banning scarves in schools (Bowen 2007: 164).
Through state broadcasters, governments can be directly involved in
the maintenance (if not creation) of religious publics. In countries where
the official policy is to recognize religious diversity (for example, post-
apartheid South Africa), there is a struggle to give all religious publics state
airtime (in this case, the SABC) as well as dealing with a citizenry that may
object to having taxes support any form of religious communication (cf.
Hackett 2006).
Sometimes these struggles take place behind the scenes. Bowen reports that
after watching a 1999 broadcast of Vivre Islam (on state television France 2),
the French interior minister reacted to seeing an eloquent young woman
wearing a headscarf. Concerned that it would encourage other women to
adopt the veil, he “‘called the director of the program and suggested they
not do that.’” Bowen writes that as a result “Islam appears on Vivre Islam
as a faith, but people do not ‘look Muslim’ unless they are shot in other
countries. There women ‘look Muslim,’ but not here in France” (Bowen
2007: 206).
Some viewers also complained that stories about the headscarf debate
were often placed just before or after segments about violent Algerian
Islamists in newscasts (Bowen 2007: 207). This sequential linking of foreign
fanaticism and the domestic veil was perceived as unfair. Bowen suggests
that this linkage is not circumstantial, because