Dr Matthews is right, but the problem goes beyond the media more closely scrutinizing the often racist and xenophobic claims of memebers of obscure religious sects.
On almost any day of the week the daily newspapers and tv media repeat what is essentially propaganda reinforcing a particular line or lines of argument.
An instructive exercise is to go to the website of Project Censored, a long running project out of the University of California. Each year they publish the 25 top censored stories. Their focus is the US but ceteris paribus it applies with equal force to Australia.
The media not only blindly accept much that is questionable as Dr Matthews argues, but also refuses to even touch a wide range of topics whose media acceptance is at the basis of many current problems.

There are a variety of reasons "the media" (the mainstream pop/tabloid media) feel ok about vilification - the propaganda they publish ritually, is for a core mandate of social control. But whose values are they reflecting and who decides on the editorial bias and culture?
Diversity in media recruitment practices is non-existent - police & security agencies have a similar problem, they are failing to adapt with a changing population. The upper executive, usually quite senior, can be steeped in a bias that is from an era of Australian political and social history where racial bias and intolerance were things the government promoted and encouraged - for which they have now apologized for...in part. The media were a central arm for the dissemination of racial intolerance during the compliant 50s - they are struggling to change. They discourage independent copy from freelancers, with little or no freelance budget and this worsens the lack of independence and diversity of their content presenting an overwhelming front of propaganda and advertising - quite awful and not worth buying, except for garden mulch.

Another possibility is that there is a lack of resources and time afforded to the staff to vet copy and ensure that stories are correct. They ritually run departmental media releases as copy to sell their advertising and the more sensational the more the pop mainstream media enjoy that - if it causes web traffic their revenue goes up, responsible or not. This comprises censorship - asking staff to do a job and then not giving them enough time to do it competently.

Worse still, is the absolute lack of racial and religious diversity among court/crime reporters. However, management realize these issues exist and do not seek to counter them, amid the liquid lunches and the sales and marketing meetings. The end result if there is too little revenue, is that the staff lose their jobs - and considering that they consistently fail to undertake them in a competent and responsible manner according to the Code of Ethics they are obliged to comply with, they get way too much pay.

In the absence of fairness, and a say, all the public can do is vote with their consumerism. Boycott those publications - there'd be a lot of Muslims, and other ethnically diverse groups who would be buying and subscribe to those tabloid publications. Money is the only thing the more influential execs value. Besides, there is a huge amount of media available to choose from now and some of it is excellent.

is the husband who have been charged a muslim? Seems to me until the facts come out this article is no better than the original report. Their is ample evidence that muslim men will not accept any family members (especially woman) converting to the truth. Many throughout the world have lost their lives. An uncovenient truth for the author.

Once again runner brings the crazy.
Meanwhile back on Earth, While I welcome the authors efforts, I fear he is doomed to failure. The media in Australian is all about selling advertising space and will pumb any hole inorder to hit the KPI's set by the Exec's.

Unfortunately this article is inself misleading; the Islamic attitude towards apostasy is well known as is this religion's intolerance of secular societies and aggressive intentions about the introduction of Sharia law.

Given these manifest and undeniable aspects of Islam the Age headline was quite reasonable within the usual framework of hyperbole the MSM operates in.

Actually I thought this article was about scepticism of that great scam AGW; that might be a more apprpriate vehicle for the author to approach defects in the MSM; otherwise he should keep his censorious propensities to himself.