There is no neutrality in Australian media

Benjamin Isakhan's paper Orientalism and the Australian News Media deals with the issue of how Middle Eastern people, or people of Islamic faith, are represented in Australia's media outlets. It is just one of many scholarly works examining how one form of faith or another is portrayed through the media. Throughout these analyses, there is a trend towards the expectation that the media is a phenomenon which professes to be neutral, and that in its dealings with religion, it has lapsed in this neutrality. In actual fact, however, it is not only unrealistic to expect the media to maintain complete neutrality in its output, but also unproductive and undesirable. 

The media is a human creation and a public creation. It will never be able to achieve complete neutrality when discussing issues that are so open to interpretation, as issues of faith and religious activity always are. Nor is it desirable that it should. If media outlets did not interpret the events and issues they covered, an entire dimension of understanding would be lost to the public. That is not to say that people who aren't journalists can't form their own opinions. The fact remains, though, that in a country such as Australia, the media acts as a kind of thermometer of public opinion. Without interpretation, this would be very difficult to understand. 

Reference
Isakhan, B. (2010). Orientalism and the Australian News Media. In Rane, H., J. Ewart and M. Abdalla (eds)., Islam and the Australian News Media. Melbourne: Melbourne Uni Press.