Reporting religion rubs salt in the wound

This evening on BBC Radio Five Live, there was the usual two-way between a newspaper journalist - today from the Times - and presenter Peter Allen, talking about the stories in the papers for tomorrow (a free advertisement for the Times, then).

The story that got my stoat was one from Glastonbury, where allegedly Catholic youngsters had been engaging in a war of words with pagans. Glastonbury, apparently, has a lot of pagans. It was so bad that some pagans had had salt thrown at them. Which to me suggests the ignorance of those doing the salt throwing. Still.

Through this was laughing from the presenter. I hope it was a laugh at the stupidity of the incident. But the thought did cross my mind that if this was name calling and throwing substances at people of another religion, naming no names because that's not fair, I doubt there would have been such hilarious treatment of the story.

I'll have to flick through the Times tomorrow to see how they handle it, but it does seem to me that, once again, some religions and minority groups are treated very differently by the media than others.