My must read of the day is "Many Outlets Are Censoring Charlie Hebdo’s Satirical Cartoons After Attack," in BuzzFeed:
Major newspapers, television channels and websites have chosen not to run cartoons of Muhammad by the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo after a deadly attack on its offices Wednesday.
In the United Kingdom, The Telegraph blurred out one of the depictions of Muhammad, which appeared on the cover of Charlie Hebdo:
The Telegraph also used a tightly cropped image of Stéphane Charbonnier, the director of Charlie Hebdo known as Charb, who was killed when masked gunmen attacked the paper’s offices, killing 12 people, including employees and police.
The New York Daily News also used blurred images of the Muhammad cartoons. This shows a pixelated photo of the 2011 "Charia Hebdo" issue that depicted Muhammad on the cover, and for which Charlie Hebdo’s office was firebombed. […]
AP spokesman Paul Colford told BuzzFeed News, "You’re correct: None of the images distributed by AP showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s been our policy for years that we refrain from moving deliberately provocative images."
Print outlets aren’t alone in their self-censorship. CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and Fox News have also said they do not plan to show the images.
They are all making a mistake.
Journalists make tough decisions everyday. Editorial standards are tricky things and journalists make difficult decisions on what information the public needs to know, whether they should see it or be given a description, and what information needs to be withheld. Part of the job is being forced to decide how to handle sensitive news.
It’s not an easy job, and it doesn’t get easier when everyone else has an opinion on how we need to do it.
Believe me, there are plenty of Hebdo cartoons with images that surely violate television censors and cannot be shown on daytime or evening news—I’m not suggesting everyone should show those, or every single Charlie Hebdo cartoon, but they should be showing some.
They should show the ones that are offensive, but not obscene.*
Some will argue that the media needs to publish these images to stand up to the terrorist, not let the terrorist win, etc. I get that, and no reasonable person likes terrorists, but that’s not the media’s purpose. Ideally, they’re not there to be advocates. They’re there to find the truth and to act on behalf of the public. That isn’t being achieved by hiding these images.
Charlie Hebdo pushed the limits of free speech and helped to ensure that the rest of us can provide the public with the kind of information that is integral to a free society—and twelve people died in the course of those efforts.
We should show their work, because the idea behind it—freedom of expression and information—is at the core of what journalists believe.
The executives at these outlets choosing to self-censor are missing an opportunity to defend journalism, but I don’t think makes them cowardly, as some have suggested. I think it makes them pathetic and apathetic to the mission of their chosen field—and that is truly dangerous.
*Here are some reasonable options:
