It is not just the BBC that is shaking in its boots and not showing any of the controversial cartoons of Prophet Mohammad. All over the world, most of the media companies have chosen not to reprint / display the cartoons. The media companies which have chosen to display the cartoons are a small minority.
Even in the US, the land of free speech and liberty, Prophet Mohammad’s cartoons have been conspicuously absent in popular media, although there is no dearth of newsbytes regarding the issue. Journalist-blogger Michelle Malkin writes about the Cowardly American Media, taking to task CNN and NBC, two of the biggest media houses in the US.
Meanwhile, The Politicker of the New York Observer writes that the entire editorial staff of the New York Press quit in protest when they were prevented from printing the cartoons of the Prophet:
The editorial staff of the alternative weekly New York Press walked out today, en masse, after the paper’s publishers backed down from printing the Danish cartoons that have become the center of a global free-speech fight.
Editor-in-Chief Harry Siegel emails, on behalf of the editorial staff:
New York Press, like so many other publications, has suborned its own professed principles. For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization. Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group—consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editorJonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions.
We have no desire to be free speech martyrs, but it would have been nakedly hypocritical to avoid the same cartoons we’d criticized others for not running, cartoons that however absurdly have inspired arson, kidnapping and murder and forced cartoonists in at least two continents to go into hiding. Editors have already been forced to leave papers in Jordan and France for having run these cartoons. We have no illusions about the power of the Press (NY Press, we mean), but even on the far margins of the world-historical stage, we are not willing to side with the enemies of the values we hold dear, a free press not least among them.
This deserves high praise. This is a rare example of a principled stand by mediapersons in an era in which we are forced to wonder if even Google, “the organizer and presenter of the world’s information”, is censoring these cartoons!
