The Cowardice Of The American Mainstream Media

by John Hawkins | February 7, 2006 4:59 pm

Originally, the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten commissioned and posted the now notorious Mohammad cartoons to prove a point: that members of the media were self-censoring themselves out of fear of Muslim extremists.

As we’ve found out since then, not only was that occurring then in Europe, it’s still occurring today. More importantly, our own mainstream media here in the United States is engaged in exactly the same sort of self-censorship that we’ve seen in Europe.

The very same newspapers that never show the slightest hesitation to publish cartoons offensive to Christians and that gleefully published images from Abu Ghraib that they knew would help inspire Muslim anger towards our country and our military, now refuse to publish these Muhammad cartoons[1], which quite frankly are extremely tame by the standards of American newspapers.

All sorts of laughably lame excuses[2] have been offered for not showing these cartoons, which are undeniably newsworthy and fall well within the bounds of decency usually observed by the mainstream media.

The WAPO said the cartoons, “wouldn’t meet our standards.” USA Today said they were “not sure there would be a point to it.” The LA Times called the images “insensitive.” Oblivously, The Boston Globe essentially claimed that no one was “trying to deny (Jyllands-Posten) its right to publish whatever it wanted.”

Worst of all, The Christian Science Monitor claimed showing cartoons featuring Muhammad was almost like “yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” which quite frankly, makes exactly the point Jyllands-Posten was trying to prove in the first place. If simply publishing a cartoon that offends Muslims is in and of itself likely to be a dangerous act, then there is a big problem here that needs to be confronted head on.

Once you cut through all this ridiculous spin, you get to the truth — which is that members of the MSM in this country, other than a handful of brave exceptions[3], are censoring what they write about Muslims out of fear that Islamo-Fascists will bomb, burn, or behead them.

Furthermore, this may seem to just be about cartoons, but what about other areas where the MSM could incur the wrath of Muslims? How much is this self-censorship affecting their coverage of terrorism, Islamic dictatorships, Iran, Israel and Palestine, the war in Iraq, and the war on terror in general?

Just what else is the mainstream media not willing to talk about because some Muslim extremist might be offended? Until the public gets some better answers to that question, perhaps they should be less trusting of what they hear from the mainstream media.