There are certain subjects that one may expect most journalists to be wholly ignorant of, and chief among them are economics and religion. On the latter, Richard John Neuhaus has offered some rather touching anecdotes of his experiences with earnest members of the Fourth Estate trying to get it right. (Interviewer: "Is it unusual that this pope is also the bishop of Rome?") As Pope Benedict XVI travels to Istanbul, one may expect to see similar displays of journalistic ignorance from various quarters. The UK Guardian's Ian Traynor sets a high standard for haphazard cribbing with a series of howlers in a history "Backstory" to the Papal-Patriarchal events.

"The Christian-Muslim faultline," he writes, "first opened up in the decades following the founding of Islam in the seventh century, with conflicts in Spain and France in 722 and 732." Depending on what one believes a "faultline" to be -- and it's reasonable to think that any two faiths have a "faultline" between them from the moment of creation -- it's safe to say that Christians were somewhat crestfallen over Islam following, say, the Battle of Yarmuk a whole century before. Or perhaps the ill feeling came when Sophronius declared the Muslim conquerers of Jerusalem in 638AD to be the "abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the Prophet as standing in the holy place." Or perhaps the "faultline" opened up with the fall of Byzantine Carthage, or the Arab siege of Constantinople. Or perhaps its true origin lay in the much later Muslim advances into places where Ian Traynor has vacationed.

Traynor is hardly done with that: "Pope Urban II called for the first crusade at the Council of Clermont on November 18 1095 after the Seljuk Turks had taken control of Jerusalem." Surely it would be a surprise to the average medieval Christian to learn that he perceived a qualitative difference between Seljuk Turkish Muslims and Arab Muslims. The true proximate cause of the First Crusade, of course, was the 1071AD Battle of Manzikert, which saw Byzantine forces crushed by the Seljuk Turks (in Anatolia, rather far from Jerusalem), who subsequently occupied most of Asia Minor. The Emperor Alexius Comnenus, after two decades coping with Manzikert's aftermath, felt compelled to request Western help -- which Pope Urban II was only too glad to provide.

Ian Traynor then reveals the existence of a remarkable period of peace: "After [the fall of the last crusader state in Acre in] 1291, campaigns by Christians against Muslims continued but began to wane by the 16th century as papal authority declined." What he means, probably, is that the formal Papal-led crusading movement went into decline in that period. But "campaigns by Christians against Muslims" went on quite well in the absence of a formal crusading imperative, ranging from Austrian and Russian wars against the Turks from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries; to the various colonial conquests of later eras. We Westerners don't see this as necessarily contiguous with the Crusading era -- but the other side often does.

The pity is that Traynor has a distinguished-looking resume that ought to preclude such nonsense. If there is a silver lining, it's the existence of pieces like this backgrounder from the LA Times's Tracy Wilkinson. But in an era when accurate, informed comment and reportage on issues of faith is a matter of life and death, it's a shame to see the mass of journalists grope their way about the subject with the obvious cluelessness of Ian Traynor.