This story in Editor & Publisher, about American media’s unwillingness to print or broadcast the cartoons that have so dramatically inflamed many in the Muslim world, speaks volumes about the industry’s lowest-common-denominator approach to its audience. From the article:
Doug Clifton, editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, agreed that the offensive nature precluded running the cartoons. “It has become a part of great angst and I don’t see any reason to run it, you can just describe it,” he said of the cartoon images. “I don’t see a need to insert ourselves in that fight.”
…
But Clifton said his paper will likely place a link to the images from another site when it runs an editorial on the issue Saturday or Sunday. “They will have the option to see it if they choose,” he said about the Web readers. “The [print] newspaper reaches a much, much broader audience.”
So it’s okay to link to the offending pictures but not to print them? I can understand the logic, but it’s a bit tortured. The cartoons, after all, are the heart of the controversy: If you don’t show it to readers, is describing it sufficient to explain why it’s offending some others?
The cartoons are all over the Web, trivially easy to find with any search engine. The protests against the pictures have had the perhaps unintended effect of making them much more available, and giving people a much greater incentive to check them out to see what the fuss is all about.
Note: I’m not talking here about the core issues surrounding the cartoons — the Danish magazine’s odd (in my opinion) decision to publish them; European newspapers’ decisions to reprint it; Muslim denunciations (and their explicit insistence, demonstrating their own misunderstanding of democratic cultures, that Western governments “punish” media for exercising free speech, however tastless); hypocrisy; etc.
Maybe this is a case where American news organizations’ timidity serves a higher purpose. But in a world where the World Wide Web is a reality, it’s a stretch to claim that pointing to what offends people is all that different from just showing them in the first place.