Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update

I believe the initial publication of the Danish Muhammad cartoons in Jyllands-Posten was an irresponsible free speech stunt by an organization acting less like a fount for journalism than as a participatory member of the broad-sense political community. At best you can say they hoped to instigate a dialogue, a dialogue that somehow got away from them so badly the whole matter ended in boycotts and riots and political turmoil and the death of 200 people.

However, as strongly as I'll always criticize that initial action, once the cartoons became news I think it was on every journalistic source in the world to re-run them and show their readers this crucial information of what these objects causing riots and death actually looked like. Dispensing that knowledge best served the duty journalism calls us to embrace in terms of informing and educating our readerships, no matter how big or how small, no matter how heavy it makes our hearts in doing so, no matter how scared we might be.

Therefore you can imagine how I feel about Yale University Press' decision to not run the cartoons in a book on the affair. I think it's ludicrous. I think it's ten thousand dirty-word qualifiers dumb, an abdication of responsibility and I condemn it with all the force I can muster.

thank you, Robert Boyd
 
posted 8:35 am PST | Permalink
 

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