Another media double standard re: cartoons

Earlier today I blogged about the blatant media double standard at play with the eagerness of most major US newspapers to publish the photos from the Abu Ghraib scandal versus their unwillingness to reprint the ‘offensive’ Mohammed cartoons.

Sadly, that is not the only double standard going on here in terms of how the media – in this case the NYT, which is of course the “newspaper of record” – is treating this story. Via TimesWatch:

One would hope and expect a liberal newspaper like the Times to have the meager virtue of consistency on matters of freedom of expression, particularly in defense of another newspaper. As the world now knows, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad last September, considered taboo (though not always recognized as such).

But Times reporter Craig Smith found the cartoons more inflammatory than he did the actual fact of Muslims burning embassies in Syria and Lebanon in protest. Even the headline to his Sunday Week in Review story suggests that the Danish newspapers’ exercise of free speech was somehow irresponsible, likening it to pouring fuel on a flame: “Adding Newsprint to the Fire.”

Smith irresponsibly compares the Danish cartoons to racist anti-black and anti-Semitic cartoons: “But this did not take place in a political vacuum. Hostile feelings have been growing between Denmark’s immigrants and a government supported by the right-wing Danish People’s Party, which has pushed anti-immigrant policies. And stereotyping in cartoons has a notorious history in Europe, where anti-Semitic caricatures fed the Holocaust, just as they feed anti-Israeli propaganda in the Middle East today.

“In the current climate, some experts on mass communications suggest, the exercise was no more benign than commissioning caricatures of African-Americans would have been during the 1960’s civil rights struggle. ‘You have to ask what was the intent of these cartoons, bearing in mind the recent history of tension in Denmark with the Muslim community,’ said David Welch, head of the Center for the Study of Propaganda and War at the University of Kent in Britain. Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, put it this way: ‘He knew what he was doing.’”

Back in the 1990s, the Times took a far different tone regarding two excretory-based exhibits offensive to Christians — though those controversies passed without the violent protests, death threats, or fire-bombings of embassies we are seeing today.

Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” consisted of a crucifix submerged in a tank of Serrano’s urine. Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” showed the icon clotted with elephant dung and surrounded by pornographic cut-outs.

Back in the previous millennium, the Times was intrigued by an art controversy at the Brooklyn Museum, showcasing what the September 24, 1999 editorial page called “a dung-stained, faux-naïve portrait of the Virgin Mary.” That would be Ofili’s artwork.

On October 2, 1999, the editors dealt with Christian offense in one clause before calling for art that “challenge[d] the public”: “To be sure, many citizens of conscience find parts of the Brooklyn exhibition repugnant, and it is understandable that many Roman Catholics would find Chris Ofili’s image of the Virgin Mary offensive. Others would agree with our colleague William Safire that while the Brooklyn Museum has a right to show what it likes, the administrators have been clumsy or needlessly provocative. Yet a Daily News poll shows that the majority of New Yorkers support the museum over Mayor Giuliani by a ratio of two to one. Those numbers show a broad-based support for New York’s role as the nation’s cultural capital. The people understand intuitively what Mr. Giuliani ignores for political gain. A museum is obliged to challenge the public as well as to placate it, or else the museum becomes a chamber of attractive ghosts, an institution completely disconnected from art in our time.”

Make sure to read the whole thing – also, read about the NYT’s refusal to reprint the cartoons here.

Hypocrisy, they name is the New York Times.

Related Toldjah So posts:

• US media will print Abu Ghraib photos but not controversial cartoons
• Multicultural sensitivity and how it can have brutal consequences
• US sides with Muslims in cartoon controversy
• More European papers reprinting “offensive” Islamic cartoons
• Bomb threats made against Danish paper over Mohammed cartoons