Sunday, February 26, 2006
Cowardice, claptrap or common respect?
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- For those who have too little
- Time to gather mountain views
- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
From the RoundTable blog
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suspended the student newspaper's editor in chief and opinions page editor this month. Their offense: republishing the Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad that have ignited violent protests in the Muslim world.
Most metropolitan newspapers in the United States, including this one, have chosen not to publish the cartoons. Newspapers in Europe widely reprinted them, though, as a sort of line drawn in the sand against self-censorship, to assure themselves that they not only can publish offensive material but also have the guts to do so -- even if the offended parties are likely to include radical Muslims inclined to violence.
Especially if the offended parties are likely to include radical Muslims inclined to violence. What is the value of a free press, after all, if it is too timid to face down bullies and tyrants?
Overwhelmingly, though, the American press has viewed the issue not as courage, but as taste, and has judged the offending material too tasteless to run.
That response, The New York Times reports, has put special pressure on campus newspapers, where a new generation of journalists feels duty bound to second-guess the judgment of the establishment.
I'm heartened that these young practitioners understand what is at stake when the subject is an unfettered and courageous press, and that they care passionately. That doesn't mean I agree the cartoons demand publication, though. I do not. Nor is the view that newspapers have a duty to run them unanimous within the younger, presumably brasher, collegiate press.
Virginia Tech's Collegiate Times did not reprint the cartoons. And it editorialized against newspapers that did. In a Feb. 9 editorial, the Times offered the opinion that the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, where the cartoons first appeared, showed poor judgment but did not push its right to free expression too far.
"However," its editors wrote, "in the months following September after the cartoon was originally published, other worldwide publications have crossed and are continuing to cross the line by reprinting the cartoons as a collective 'Screw you!' to the Middle East. ...
"To the publications who have published the cartoons, or are planning to in the near future: People are dying. It's time to do what you should do instead of what you can do and help put this issue to rest before more lives are lost."
I don't hold with that view, either.
To withhold publication for fear the material would be used to incite violence would be to bow to extortion. A free press cannot let the lunatics dictate the terms for proper public discourse.
But neither should newspapers let the lunatics bait them into violating their own standards, just to show 'em we're not skeered.
The Roanoke Times did not publish satirical cartoons of Muhammad for the same reason we do not publish blasphemous images of Jesus (or are not supposed to, anyway); and discontinued publishing the edgy, black, urban cartoon "Boondocks"; and agonize over publishing newsworthy photographs that show victims of torture, searching out those that will illustrate, yet not be so grotesque as to alienate our readers: It acted as a gatekeeper.
That's what newspapers do.
They can't print everything, so they make choices based on an array of criteria, one of them being a sensitivity to the feelings of their readers. That doesn't mean newspapers never offend anyone. They do try not to do so without good reason.
Rich Martin, former managing editor of The Roanoke Times and now an associate professor of journalism at the University of Illinois, explained the trouble the student editors ran into by recalling a dictum of Walter Rugaber, our retired publisher: "Rugaber always said he didn't mind if we pissed people off, just don't do it gratuitously."
Of course, what is gratuitous is a judgment call every time. And some on the Illinois campus were not upset by the cartoons, but by the editors' suspension. "What happened to freedom of speech?" one student asked a New York Times reporter. "If we start saying we can't look at things, what's next? Our books?"
But in an e-mail to me, Martin said the problem on The Daily Illini was not a First Amendment issue.
"The paper had without question the right to publish the cartoons. It was handled poorly, in my opinion. The cartoons appeared to be almost slapped into the paper on the editorial page, and there was really very little context presented as to why they were being published at that time. It could have been handled much differently and much more effectively (the student paper at Northern Illinois University did so), and it could have really provoked an illuminating discussion. Instead of light, though, it generated heat."
Whether to publish the cartoons can be decided differently, and for principled reasons, by different news organizations with different audiences and different "personalities."
Conservative critics sneer that "the liberal media" is sacrificing its independence to political-correctness claptrap and cowardice. I've put too many essays on the Commentary page of this newspaper that were highly critical of Islam, as a religion as well as a political force, to give either charge credence here.
Now, if "The Daily Show" starts treating Islam with reverence, I'll worry.
Elizabeth Strother is a Roanoke Times editorial writer based in the paper's New River Valley bureau.
