Balanced coverage of religious violence?

Maybe you have heard about the religious, social, and ethnic tensions in parts of Nigeria. Here was a headline today from the AFP:




http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100308/wl_afp/nigeriaunrest



Machete attacks on Christian villages kill 500-plus in Nigeria



This was the first news headline on Yahoo! at 4:30PST, so millions of eyes may have browsed it in a matter of minutes. It's terrible and despicable; I think we all can agree. What's also terrible is that in this 791-word article, not until the 717th word do readers learn of a potential motive for the attack:

Rights activists said the slaughter appeared to be revenge for the January attacks in which mainly Muslims were killed.

In high school journalism, they told us to structure stories like inverted pyramids, with the most important facts coming earlier. Isn't motive pretty important, or do they deliberately bury anything that makes Christians into aggressors and Muslims into victims? If you had 10 seconds to scan the article, starting from the lead, you may assume that a bunch of Muslim barbarians slaughtered innocent Christians minding their own business. Like Osama and the Hollywood depictions, every Muslim on the planet appears to be very hostile against non-Muslims. Not that a prior attack justifies this atrocity, but it adds context. Apparently the author and editor felt that marginally-relevant material like this was more important than motive:

The Vatican led a wave of outrage with spokesman Federico Lombardi expressing the Roman Catholic Church's "sadness" at the "horrible acts of violence".

"People were attacked with axes, daggers and cutlasses -- many of them children, the aged and pregnant women."

I seriously doubt that the Christian-on-Muslim attack in Jos in January got as much attention. Apparently the AFP did minimally report on that clash, but the article was much shorter, and again, you only learn in the last sentence that 364 of the 492 victims were Muslim, suggesting that the violence was majority perpetrated by Christians. But many scholars think that this year's violence is not primarily due to religion, as the two warring groups also compete for agricultural resources, speak different languages, and have different tribal origins.



http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gzl2_TiUNy_W4vqIC3NZSasnA5HA