Most major news media picked up the story about the recent march for secularism that took place in the Lebanese capital of Beirut. But not all of the outlets did a good job of reporting it. In fact, by relying on stock assumptions about religion in the Middle East, some of the reporting on the event ended up obscuring the facts on the ground rather than revealing them.

A piece in the Los Angeles Times is a case in point. Readers who knew little about Lebanon would assume from Borzou Daragahi's article that Lebanon is culturally and politically dominated by Islam.

Describing the event in his lede, Daragahi said protestors "marched… to demand that religion be excised from politics, a rare assertion of secularism in a region increasingly defined by religious identity." But he never explained the distinctive role of religion in Lebanese politics or how that political culture reflects the country's particular demographic composition.

In contrast, Reuters noted high up in its story that marchers wanted to see "a secular system in place of the Muslim-Christian sectarianism that permeates politics, employment and family status matters in Lebanon."

The Reuters article helpfully clarified religion's role in Lebanese politics: "Lebanon, whose five million people are split into 18 sects, developed a power-sharing system enshrined in a 1943 national covenant which gave Christians a majority in parliament and said the president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shi'ite Muslim."

Stories that omitted this important background left readers without a context for understanding events reported as news. As a result, it would be easy for some to draw mistaken conclusions based on the reporting—especially in the case of the Times story, which quoted three march participants, all of whom were either practicing or former Muslims.

This vagueness with the facts also diminished the usefulness of CNN's Lebanon brief, which mentioned that "power is distributed proportionally among religious communities" but failed to note what would be surprising to many Americans: that the distribution of power in Lebanon is shared by the country's Muslim and Christian populations.

Along with Reuters, BBC News and a number of other outlets did a good job of providing context for the march—thereby making the particulars of Lebanese society come alive for their readers and viewers. But the off-handedness of the Times' and CNN's reporting still warrants close scrutiny. Misconceptions about Islam and the Middle East abound in the United States; for journalists, filling in these gaps in our knowledge is a public service. Reinforcing our ignorance, on the other hand, is inexcusable.

Kim Daniels is pursuing an M.A. in broadcast journalism at USC Annenberg.