A rchive Date
[ 15-02-2006 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/Columnists/Corbella_Licia/2006/02/15/1443132.html
Tasteless caricature has no place here
By LICIA CORBELLA
Wed, February 15, 2006
I am being called both a "coward" (ironically by those afraid to leave their name and number) and "brave." I'm also being described as a "pathetic appeaser" and a "wise person;" a "sycophant" and "someone who calls 'em as I see 'em."
No wonder many of us media types are so neurotic - one minute someone strokes your ego, the next you're nothing more than "a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas." How did that reader know I'm a huge T.S. Eliot fan?
Others, a kind man named Mohammed phoned simply to thank the Sun for not running "THE cartoons" before I accidentally disconnected him (sorry Mohammed).
Yesterday, the controversy over "the cartoons" of the Prophet Muhammad continued, if not raged anew. There were more riots across the Muslim world - more Molotov cocktails hurled at western embassies, more calls of death to a whole range of targets, including the old standbys of America, Britain and now Tony Blair.
Will Canada soon be added to that list? Last week in the Sun, we ran a photo of an angry demonstrator holding a placard that said: "We hate Denmark and Canada."
Huh? At that point, no publications in Canada had run the caricatures of Muhammad. That, of course, has changed.
Dire predictions are being made now that the Western Standard, a Calgary-based bi-monthly magazine with a relatively small circulation, published eight of the original 12 Danish cartoons that are being blamed for fueling the violence around the world.
The magazine's publisher, Ezra Levant, points out that cartoons don't kill people, murderers kill people. True enough. But a Canadian Islamist group says by reprinting the blasphemous caricatures of the prophet, the magazine could be jeopardizing the safety of Canada's soldiers in Afghanistan.
"I think the fact that people choose to reprint the cartoons could put our troops in danger," said Riad Saloojee of the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations.
That's a point that Calgary-based documentary film maker Garth Pritchard, who has spent a lot of time with our troops in Afghanistan, made to me on Monday.
And Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor, a former general, also expressed concern yesterday that reprinting the cartoon may further endanger Canadian troops.
It's sad and virtually incomprehensible to most of us who live in the free world to understand such violent reactions to cartoons, but it is a reality we shouldn't ignore.
So, is that why the Sun decided not to republish the cartoons? No, but it is now an added rationale.
There are several reasons why we decided not to run these cartoons. After this controversy broke several weeks ago now, we looked at the cartoons in question and determined that we would not have run these cartoons prior to this controversy and therefore we won't now.
Why? Because they are in very poor taste. They are offensive to the religious sensitivities of Muslims, and just as we wouldn't knowingly run cartoons that are crudely disrespectful to Christians, Jews or any other religion, we will not gratuitously insult Muslims either.
This is not unusual. Every day, we make thousands of judgment calls as to what we cover and don't cover. What gets space and what doesn't. That's not censorship, it's editing.
The Calgary Sun, for instance, has a long-standing policy of not running photos of dead bodies except under exceptional circumstances, such as when the pope was lying in state.
This was likely the only newspaper in the western world that didn't run the famous photo of the firefighter carrying the baby out of the blown up federal building in Oklahoma City. Was that the right decision?
I didn't think so, and said so, but it's our policy. We often edit out the more graphic details of sex crime and murder trials, too.
We also never print curse words, unless it's part of a quote from an official, never just gratuitously for effect.
That doesn't mean we won't and don't sometimes offend our readers. We just don't make a determined point of it.
That doesn't make us brave or cowardly - just discerning.
Have a letter for the editor? E-mail it to webmaster@calgarysun.com
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