Participants agreed Saturday that ignorance and "lazy" media coverage following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks fueled an "illogical reaction" among people in the United States and the pan-Muslim world and held the phenomenon has been compounded by stereotypes that still permeate mainstream media channels on both sides.

Hafiz al-Mirazi, the Washington bureau chief for the Qatar-based satellite television station al-Jazeera, said many American journalists were guilty of "lazy journalism" in which they failed to "distinguish between a group of Muslims and the faith itself."

"(Journalists) are going directly to the faith and saying trash," he said, insisting members of the U.S. media would benefit from reaching out to Muslims in their own communities rather than adopting caricatures that feed Islamophobia at home and anti-Americanism abroad.

A 2004 Pew Research Center poll of anti-American views in the Muslim world showed negative views persist as much as ever, with 67 percent of Jordanians, 50 percent of Pakistanis and 46 percent of Moroccans queried giving "very unfavorable" ratings to the United States.

Al-Mirazi expressed particular disdain for shows "that are passed off as news."

"Shows like ('The) O'Reilly (Factor') are really a mix of serious news and tabloids," he said, noting such programs are not in short supply overseas. "We have our own O'Reillys in the Arab world."

Al-Mirazi went on to discuss his experience working for al-Jazeera, the television network the Bush administration has accused of propagating anti-U.S. vitriol.

In November 2003 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused the station of aiding Iraqi insurgents in assaults on U.S. troops through biased coverage.

"Since its founding in late 1996, al-Jazeera has been accused of being anti whatever country it covers, not only American," al-Mirazi countered, citing the station is banned from broadcasting in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

"Instead of facing issues and problems, (politicians) are trying to scapegoat a media, whether Arab ... or sometimes the American media," he said.

He noted the recent controversy over the alleged desecration of the Koran by U.S. interrogators to intimidate Muslim prisoners at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was broken by Newsweek, a "non anti-American agency." The news magazine has since retracted the item, citing sourcing issues, but the report itself sparked deadly anti-U.S. protests in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Al-Mirazi said an obsessive focus on blaming either side obscures the "real issues" at hand.

Claude Salhani, international editor at United Press International, maintained the U.S. news media was partly to blame for shallow, unbalanced post-Sept. 11 coverage.

"A good portion of U.S. media is generally ignorant about Islam and its rich culture," Salhani said. "Certainly, (American) media needs to be better educated and must not generalize about Muslims."

Salhani noted many American reporters groomed covering city hall suddenly found themselves "propelled into the biggest story of the decade," hampered by foreign-language deficiencies and cultural unfamiliarity.

He said, moreover, that al-Qaida head Osama bin Laden and his followers were given "too much U.S. airtime," and though the Bush administration made some efforts to reach out to Muslims, the use of terms like "crusade" at the state level "put things back to square one."

But Salhani said a confluence of factors catalyzed a broad-based grassroots shift toward anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States, notably that all 19 hijackers were Arab Muslims and what he called the "mixed reaction of the Arab world" to the tragedy.

"Part of the problem is there is no unified voice speaking for ... moderate Islam, which represents the majority of 1.2 billion Muslims," Salhani said, arguing moderate Muslims and organizations had fallen short of making concerted efforts to denounce radical Islam.

A 2004 national survey conducted by Cornell University found nearly half of Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of American Muslims. Another recent poll showed one in four Americans regard Muslims living among them with suspicion.

Al-Mirazi was also reluctant to declare news media largely responsible for the status quo.

"We have a lot of problems in the Muslim world and we should not always blame the American media for distorting our image," he said. "We should work more to improve the reality and practices in both worlds, instead of blaming the media."

The media event kicked off the annual conference held over the weekend by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, America's largest Muslim civil-liberties group.