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February 19, 2006
The Misguided And Cowardly Outrage Of The Press

We have watched two separate news stories overwhelm the national press over the past fortnight. The first is the deadly protests that have come from imams stoking Muslim ire over four-month-old editorial cartoons satirizing Islam and Mohammed. The latter is the outrage of the White House press corps and the national media in general over an eighteen-hour delay in reporting the accidental shooting of Harry Whittington by the Vice-President. One would hope that the outrage of the media might get expressed over the former more so than the latter -- but that would apparently give more credit for courage and integrity than the national media deserves.

Jeff Jacoby notes in his Boston Globe column today that the press has mostly abdicated their position as the conveyors of truth and information when the effort carries any real risk:

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. ...

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, [Eason Jordan], 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."

Instead of informing the people of the context of these riots -- the almost ridiculously mild satire of the cartoon published four months ago -- they have steadfastly declined to print them at all. While they regularly issue pronouncements about the right of the people to know, they have banded together to ensure that most of their readers have no idea exactly what the Danish cartoonists drew that have prompted the burnings of at least a half-dozen embassies around the world.

At the same time, the same media outlets that have kept its customers in the dark in one of the most important stories in the conflict with radical Islamists screeched like banshees when Dick Cheney took all of eighteen hours to reveal that he had accidentally shot his hunting partner and friend on a Saturday afternoon. For days, these stalwarts of journalistic courage took turns castigating Scott McClellan for Cheney's failure to give the story to the White House press corps, arguing that the story was so important that it could not be trusted to the Corpus Christi local paper to inform the nation. David Gregory, whose network has not even allowed a pixilated version of the Prophet cartoons to appear lest they incur the wrath of Muslim terrorists, accused the White House of censorship and coverups in supposedly hiding the shooting from the nation.

Jacoby has this correct. The media attacks those who they know will not spend much energy fighting back. Gregory could act like a rude, spoiled child denied his choice of birthday gift because he knew the White House would not dare to even expel him from the room. However, their supposed calling to keep the people informed suddenly takes a powder when the remote threat of violence appears. This only acts to encourage such threats in the future, as the nutcases take a lesson from the pusillanimity of the mainstream American media, especially in contrast with their European counterparts that have taken a stand against extortion and published the cartoons in defense of the Danish press.

When our media has the testicular fortitude to report on terrorists honestly, then they will have gained the moral authority to lecture any White House on censorship and the responsibility of fully informing the public. Until then, such demonstrations as we saw this week by the White House press corps only stands as a perverse monument to the media's hypocrisy and venality.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

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Posted by Ed Morrissey at February 19, 2006 11:50 AM

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