There may be no atheists in foxholes, but apparently there are a few Wiccans.

Stories broke this week concerning a Wiccan stone-circle established at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs--that bastion of evangelical Christianity. But what exactly was the story? That depended on which media outlet you turned to for the news.

If you read Dan Elliot's Associated Press article--which was widely published as the sole notice in newspapers and on Web sites like the New York Times, the Washington Post and ABC News--you would have read a story about a step forward in the Air Force Academy's effort to foster religious tolerance.

According to Elliot, after a 2005 study revealed widespread harassment and discrimination against various religious groups as well as non-evangelical Christians, the Academy has taken steps like establishing the stone-circle to remedy the situation.

"To me this is a freedom thing," said academy chaplain Lt. Col. William Ziegler, who was quoted in Elliot's article.

Maybe it's a freedom thing, or maybe it's a case of the military establishment bending over backwards to accommodate a minority of wacky witches and dodo druids as FoxNews seemed to suggest.

"Stonehenge on the Rockies?" the Fox report asks with an incredulous question mark.

USA Today religion reporter Cathy Lynn Grossman highlighted the striking contrast in U.S. military policy with her headline: "Wiccans in uniform? Yes. Gays? Not yet." Grossman describes the "whiplash" of the week's military news, with resistance to gays in the service on one end of the spectrum and the Wiccan circle on the other, presumably more forward-looking, tolerant end.

But if you had happened to come across the item in Wednesday's Los Angeles Times, you would have read about the large wooden cross, made of railroad ties, that was discovered at the heralded Wiccan circle two weeks ago.

To be fair to the outlets that omitted that detail, the academy had not yet made the erection of the cross public--most likely because it didn't fit into the narrative of improved religious tolerance that the news media seemed all too eager to report.

While the L.A. Times reported the incident as an offense against Wiccans, it still seemed to miss the broader narrative: While the military is busy setting up Wiccan circles and Buddhist meditation groups to prove its tolerance, it has done little to address the underlying culture of aggressive Christian proselytizing that has made these "alternative" faiths the object of harassment or discrimination.

In fact, the original 2005 report that exposed religious "intolerance" at the academy mostly cited instances of inappropriate proselytizing and overt religious expression by evangelical Christians, not specific attacks against other religions.

Recent reports about the military using "Jesus Rifles" inscribed with New Testament verses and video that appears to show military chaplains at Bagram Air force Base telling troops how to distribute Bibles to Afghans have served to highlight the pervasiveness of this culture of aggressive Christian evangelism.

The question that news media should be asking is not whether the military is doing enough to combat intolerance of religions other than Christianity, but whether it is doing enough to discourage evangelizing in one of our most important public institutions.

Meghan McCarty is an M.A. candidate in journalism at USC Annenberg and a Graduate Associate at Annenberg TV News.