[Mb-civic] When fear cows the media - Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  When fear cows the media

By Jeff Jacoby  |  February 19, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THE PHOENIX is Boston's leading ''alternative" newspaper, the kind of 
brash, pull-no-punches weekly that might have been expected to print 
without hesitation the Prophet Mohammed cartoons that Islamists have 
been using to incite rage and riots across the Muslim world. Its 
willingness to push the envelope was memorably demonstrated in 2002, 
when it broke with most media to publish a grisly photograph of Daniel 
Pearl's severed head, and supplied a link on its website to the 
sickening video of the Wall Street Journal reporter's beheading.

But the Phoenix isn't publishing the Mohammed drawings, and in a 
brutally candid editorial it explained why.

''Our primary reason," the editors confessed, is ''fear of retaliation 
from . . . bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those 
who do not believe as they do . . . Simply stated, we are being 
terrorized, and . . . could not in good conscience place the men and 
women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical 
jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, 
this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year-publishing history."

The vast majority of US media outlets have shied away from reproducing 
the drawings, but to my knowledge only the Phoenix has been honest 
enough to admit that it is capitulating to fear. Many of the others have 
published high-minded editorials and columns about the importance of 
''restraint" and ''sensitivity" and not giving ''offense" to Muslims. 
Several have claimed they wouldn't print the Danish cartoons for the 
same reason they wouldn't print overtly racist or anti-Semitic material. 
The managing editor for news of The Oregonian, for example, told her 
paper's ombudsman that not running the images is like avoiding the 
N-word -- readers don't need to see a racial slur spelled out to 
understand its impact. Yet a Nexis search turns up at least 14 occasions 
since 1999 when The Oregonian has published the N-word unfiltered. So 
there are times when it is appropriate to run material that some may 
find offensive.

Rationalizations notwithstanding, the refusal of the US media to show 
the images at the heart of one of the most urgent stories of the day is 
not about restraint and good taste. It's about fear. Editors and 
publishers are afraid the thugs will target them as they targeted Danny 
Pearl and Theo van Gogh; afraid the mob will firebomb their newsrooms as 
it has firebombed Danish embassies. ''We will not accept less than 
severing the heads of those responsible," an imam in Gaza preaches. 
''Whoever insults a prophet, kill him," reads the sign carried by a 
demonstrator in London. Those are not figures of speech but deadly 
threats, and American newspapers and networks are intimidated.

Not everyone has succumbed. The Weekly Standard reproduced the 12 
cartoons, and some have appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New 
York Sun, and even Spare Change News, a Boston biweekly sold by homeless 
people. But there has been nothing like the defiance shown in Europe, 
where some two dozen publications in 13 countries have run the cartoons, 
insisting that they will not allow thugs to decide what a free press can 
publish.

Journalists can be incredibly brave, but when it comes to covering the 
Arab and Muslim world, too many news organizations have knuckled under 
to threats. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, a veteran foreign 
correspondent, admitted long ago that ''physical intimidation" by the 
PLO led reporters to skew their coverage of important stories or to 
ignore them ''out of fear." Similarly, CNN's former news executive, 
Jordan Eason, acknowledged after the fall of Saddam Hussein that his 
network had long sanitized its news from Iraq, since reporting the 
unvarnished truth ''would have jeopardized the lives of . . . our 
Baghdad staff."

Like the Nazis in the 1930s and the Soviet communists in the Cold War, 
the Islamofascists are emboldened by appeasement and submissiveness. 
Give the rampagers and book-burners a veto over artistic and editorial 
decisions, and you end up not with heightened sensitivity and cultural 
respect, but with more rampages and more books burned. You betray ideals 
that generations of Americans have died to defend.

Worst of all, you betray as well the dissidents and reformers within the 
Islamic world, the Muslim Sakharovs and Sharanskys and Havels who yearn 
for the free, tolerant, and democratic culture that we in the West take 
for granted. What they want to see from America is not appeasement and 
apologies and a dread of giving offense. They want to see us face down 
the fanatics, be unintimidated by bullies. They want to know that in the 
global struggle against Islamist extremism, we won't let them down.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/19/when_fear_cows_the_media/
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