Matt Taibbi writes: Older, legacy outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the Associated Press almost all turtled when faced with the decision of whether or not to print the offending cartoons which precipitated terrorist murder in Paris.
In a world dominated by image journalism, we suddenly became lovers of letters again, satisfied that verbal descriptions are enough to convey the gist of the story. Here’s how the New York Times explained its decision (emphasis mine):
Under Times standards, we do not normally publish images or other material deliberately intended to offend religious sensibilities. After careful consideration, Times editors decided that describing the cartoons in question would give readers sufficient information to understand today’s story.
Right, because who needs pictures when you can just describe the thing? Imagine if news outlets collectively decided to only verbally describe the events of 9/11? (Ironically, the attack would have had significantly less impact, been less of a boon for terrorist recruiting worldwide, had they done that).
These complaints immediately thrust us way back in time, to the late Eighties, back to the pre-Internet days when large numbers of Americans were capable of being shocked by artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. The latter’s Piss Christ, a set piece of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s own urine, caused Serrano to receive death threats back in the day. The piece was ultimately vandalized by angry Catholic activists.
Now a secondary result of the Hebdo bombings has been a move by our society to censor itself in ways it wasn’t willing to before the attacks.
Beyond all of that, the publish-or-not issue is a controversy only an intellectual could talk himself into. There’s been talk, both before the Hebdo attacks and since, that the cartoons were “silly provocations” (this was Le Figaro’s pre-attack judgment) and that other similar satires were just so much “oil on the fire” (this was what French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said, also prior to the attack).
The implication is that, yes, we have a right to be offensive, but let’s not be offensive this time, maybe just this once, because — and this is the part that’s usually not said out loud — this particular group of satire targets is more than unusually violent and nuts and struggles more even than the average fundamentalist on the sense of humor front.
That point of view is a gross and shameful capitulation. I’m against easing back on the offensive cartoons “just this once” for the same reason I don’t believe in fighting al-Qaeda by “temporarily” tossing out habeas corpus and committing acts of torture: you lose in advance when you give up your culture.
Free speech is a crucial part of who we are. If we give it up because a vocal minority in a different culture disagrees — a minority, incidentally that believes we had things figured better in the seventh century — then we don’t deserve free speech at all. And yes, it sucks that we have to risk bloodshed and destruction over a cartoon, but that’s what’s on the line here, our way of life.
The answer here isn’t more self-censorship, but standing on the principle of everyone learning to calm down, get a life, and tolerate the occasional weird idea. This is particularly true when the only places these ideas are “displayed” are on Internet servers, where you have to go looking for them to find them. We’re really going to run even from that? Since when do we give in to bullies so easily?
Note: W-T-W.org is committed to using the work of cartoonists around the world to make pithy, trenchant commments on the articles we run. Here is contributor Doaa Eladl:
