A good way to evaluate the mass media, and especially the visual media, is to look not at what is being said, but at the images projected, especially the image of enemy.

When I wrote critical pieces about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in regard to the anti-Semitic bias in the film, I simply noted that all the Jewish leaders were wearing black hats and had bad teeth. In fact, all the actors portraying the Jewish leaders seemed to be channeling Lee J. Cobb. Now, of course, Mel Gibson himself has answered the question of whether he harbors anti-Semitic views and we can all move on.

In an episode of the immensely popular Fox TV news series 24, when the show portrayed obviously Islamic terrorists attacking a nuclear power plant in the U.S., Fox produced an on-air disclaimer, telling viewers that the Muslim-American community renounces terrorism.

In watching this episode on tape, however, I was struck by the contrast between the very fair-skinned Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) with his blond streaked hair and the dark, often shadowy faces of the “terrorists”. What did the viewer take away from this episode? The flat text of the disclaimer, or the image of the shadowy Muslim?

Go back to the early years of television. Was Native American religion fairly portrayed in the popular westerns of that period? Native Americans were not depicted as even being religious, except perhaps for ceremonies about war. And the cowboys wore white hats most of the time.

What is dangerous about visual media, in my view, is that images work so much on an unconscious level. Something as simple as black hats vs. white hats is such an established metaphor for good vs. evil that that the message about who is to be feared doesn’t even register on a conscious level.

I would add that I have learned a lot from the readers’ responses to the weekly comments by all of us who contribute to On Faith. The readers’ replies demonstrate that there is no way that any mass medium can ever, given the wide diversity of views on “religion,” be able to “treat religion fairly.” One person’s “fairness” is obviously another person’s “outrage”.

Yet, I think we can all become, and must become, far more visually literate and critical of mass media manipulation through images. Such critical thinking might close the gap a little between perceptions of "fair" and perceptions of "outrage."