Tim Rutten in the LA Times blasts the American media for their pusillanimous non-response to Muslim intimidation while journalists throughout the Islamic world suffer imprisonment or death for writing sensible and truthful columns:
Timidity and indifference are a lethal combination.
It was bad enough when, one after another, major American and Western European news organizations capitulated to violent Islamic extremists and refused to let their readers or viewers see any of the cartoons depicting Muhammad that have triggered what amounts to a pogrom against Danes and other Westerners across the Muslim world. This craven abrogation of the standards by which news judgments normally are made was matched by the cringing, minor-key response that passed for diplomacy on the part of Washington and most of the European governments.
The Western news media's stampede for safety has created quite a draft, and left to swing in the wind are the courageous Arab journalists who printed some of the cartoons in connection with stories and editorials denouncing the violence.
To its credit, the New York Times this week reported that 11 journalists in five Mideastern countries now are facing prosecution for fully reporting this story. One of them is Jihad Momani. The government of the U.S.'s close ally, Jordan, thinks he committed a crime when he wrote:
"What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras, or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony?"
Truth inconveniences tyranny.
In Yemen, three journalists already are in jail and a fourth is a fugitive. A local imam says, "The government must execute them." Their crime? Writing editorials that urged fellow Muslims to avoid violence and to accept an apology from the Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, which first published the cartoons.
Eleven journalists facing prison, perhaps death, for the crime of publishing sense and where are the outraged editorials in American and European newspapers? Where are the letter-writing campaigns and protests on their behalf from their colleagues in the United States?
Indeed.
In defense of the American media, though, it's hard to devote time to foreign stories about journalists being persecuted for writing the truth when there's so much hay to be made over Dick Cheney's tardiness in informing the MSM that he'd been involved in a hunting accident. The media must allocate its limited resources to those matters which are most important and nothing is more important than pounding Dick Cheney every chance they get.
So if its journalistic courage you want to see, why then, just watch the pressroom heroes pin White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan to the wall every time there's a press briefing. David Gregory even called him a "jerk" recently. Now that's genuine Congressional-medal-of-honor level heroism.
