The Muhammad cartoons that have sparked arson, violence and murder have been published by precious few US media outlets. While the cartoons themselves may not be news, now that people have died for them and President Bush is reacting to them , they're news, like it or not. So why won't US newspapers and TV publish this news, and allow their readers and viewers to judge for themselves?
Feels like self-censorship, doesn't it?
It apparently feels like censorship to the editorial staff of the tiny and independent New York Press, who resigned en masse to protest the paper's last-minute decision to block publication of the cartoons in an issue dedicated to the cartoons and their bloody aftermath:
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....
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.
Google faces a similar moral challenge in censoring search results as the staff of the NY Press faced in censoring the cartoons. Like the NY Press, Google has "suborned its own professed principles" of free access to unbiased information. And Google is "nakedly hypocritical" in violating its own promise to operate Google " like a well-run newspaper."
