Daily Alert Archives

A Failure of the Press

(Washington Post) William J. Bennett and Alan M. Dershowitz - * Since the war on terrorism began, the mainstream press has had no problem printing stories and pictures that challenged the administration and, in the view of some, compromised our war and peace efforts. * For the past month, the Islamist street has been on an intifada over cartoons depicting Muhammad that were first published months ago in a Danish newspaper. The mainstream U.S. media have covered this worldwide uprising, yet it has refused, with but a few exceptions, to show the cartoons that purportedly caused all the outrage. * To put it simply, radical Islamists have won a war of intimidation. They have cowed the major news media from showing these cartoons. The mainstream press has capitulated to the Islamists. * A new policy from the mainstream media has been promulgated: If a group is strong enough in its reaction to a story or caricature, the press will refrain from printing that story or caricature. At bottom, this is an unacceptable form of not-so-benign bigotry, representing a higher expectation from Christians and Jews than from Muslims. * Our understanding of the First Amendment and a free press is informed by the fact that without broad freedom, without responsibility for the right to know carried out by courageous writers, editors, political cartoonists, and publishers, our democracy would be weaker, if not nonexistent. There should be no group or mob veto of a story that is in the public interest. * When we were attacked on Sept. 11, we knew the main reason for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never imagined was that the free press - an institution at the heart of those virtues and freedoms - would be among the first to surrender.
2006-02-23 00:00:00
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