Political cartoonist takes on the “nanny media” regarding the Mohammed cartoon
More on the Danish Mohammed cartoons: Syndicated cartoonist Ted Rall blasts the “nanny media” for failing to print the Mohammed cartoon. (For those who don’t know his work, Rall is a left-of-center cartoonist.)
As the only syndicated political cartoonist who also writes a syndicated column, my living depends on freedom of the press. I can’t decide who’s a bigger threat: the deluded Islamists who hope to impose Sharia law on Western democracies, or the right-wing clash-of-civilization crusaders waving the banner of “free speech”–the same folks who call for the censorship and even murder of anti-Bush cartoonists here–as an excuse to join the post-9/11 Muslims-suck media pile-on. Most reasonable people reject both–but neither is as dangerous to liberty as America’s self-censoring newspaper editors and broadcast producers.
“CNN has chosen not to show the [Danish Mohammed] cartoons out of respect for Islam,” said the news channel.
“We always weigh the value of the journalistic impact against the impact that publication might have as far as insulting or hurting certain groups,” said an editor at The San Francisco Chronicle.
“The cartoons didn’t meet our long-held standards for not moving offensive content,” said the Associated Press.
Bull—-.
If these cowards were worried about offending the faithful, they wouldn’t cover or quote such Muslim-bashers as Ann Coulter, Christopher Hitchens or George W. Bush. The truth is, our national nanny media is managed by cowards so terrified by the prospect of their offices being firebombed that they wallow in self-censorship.
Precisely because they subvert free speech from within with their oh-so-reasonable odes for “moderation” and against “sensationalism,” the gatekeepers of our national nanny media are more dangerous to Western values than distant mullahs and clueless neocons combined. Editors and producers decide not only what’s fit to print but also what’s not: flag-draped coffins and body bags arriving from Iraq, photographs of Afghan civilians, their bodies reduced to blobs of blood and protoplasm, all purged from our national consciousness. You might think it’s news when the vice president tells a senator to “go f— yourself” on the Senate floor, but you’d be wrong–only tortured roundabout descriptions (like “f—“) make newsprint. “This is a family newspaper,” any editor will say, arguing for self-censorship–as if kids couldn’t fill in those three letters in “f—.”
As if kids read the paper.
(My mom sent me that link. When you’re a reporter, everyone you know eventually turns into a media critic. Fortunately, most of the people in my life no longer blame me for something that CNN said — or didn’t say — or whatever idiocy occurs on the LA television news shows.)
Interesting, the Columbia Journalism Review, one of the most respected (and most harsh) of media critics, has been silent on the issue, despite banging the drums for better journalism on every other subject (including lots of chatter about the Cheney shooting coverage). That’s both surprising and disappointing.
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