Should The Media Cover If Someone Does Something Really Offensive That Would Cause Deaths Around The World?

Philip M. Stone September 16, 2010 Follow on Twitter

Last weekend a preacher in Florida pulled back from the brink and did not burn some 200 Qurans as he had threatened. But for the week before he had several times more media on his doorstep than he had parishioners in his flock and the world was on edge for violent global protests. But if he had gone ahead should the media have covered knowing full well how the Muslim world would have reacted?

During the week a CNN International anchor and a colleague were talking about that and she suggested jokingly with laughs that the media should not cover, followed by words along the line of “Some hope”.  But in reality she really came close to hitting the nail on the head.

The best description of how the media should have covered came from an AP memo by Tom Kent, a deputy managing editor and standards editor, who told staff, “The concept of this planned event is offensive to many Muslims worldwide. National leaders and spokesmen for other religious denominations have also found the plan repugnant. Should the event happen on Saturday, the AP will not distribute images or audio that specifically show Qurans being burned, and will not provide detailed text descriptions of the burning…

“AP policy is not to provide coverage of events that are gratuitously manufactured to provoke and offend. In the past, AP has declined to provide images of cartoons mocking Islam and Jews. AP has often declined to provide images, audio or detailed descriptions of particularly bloody or grisly scenes, such as the sounds and moments of beheadings and shootings, displays of severed heads on pikes and images of hostages who are displayed by hostage-holders in an effort to intimidate their adversaries and advance their cause. Decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.

“From time to time, a member or customer will insist that we distribute offensive material to them so they can make the decision about whether or not to publish it. We’ve had to make clear that a decision to distribute, for us, is the same as a decision to publish for them. We must adhere to our own standards.”

It brings to mind the Danish cartoon episode back in 2005 when the Jyllands-Posten newspaper ran illustrations of the Prophet Mohammed that caused riots and deaths around the Muslim world. The defense was freedom of the press and in a democracy while the media certainly has the right to offend people and religions, the question is should it? The famous US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Homes once asked if “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater” is a permitted use of free speech when its outcome could be dangerous – a panic. He believed it went beyond the permissible.

But German Chancellor Angela Merkel, at an award presentation last week for Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist, strongly defended his cartoons. "It is irrelevant whether his caricatures are tasteless or not, whether he thinks they are necessary or helpful, or not. Is he allowed to do that? Yes, he can," she said. But what about the social responsibility of the press?

Legally the preacher could have burned those Qurans (although there was talk that because the ink could be considered hazardous material the fire department might have stepped in for a dubious intervention) and if he did the burning the coverage would certainly have created hell around the Muslim world.

The three major US terrestrial networks all said they would cover the burning within “context”, whatever that means. ABC said: “We plan to fully cover this event like we would any other story — after the event we will have a serious editorial discussion about what images we will or won’t air. Any images we do present will be put in full context for our audience.” CBS said, “We will cover the story with the appropriate context, as we would any other news story,” and at NBC it was “Our policy is to cover news events as they take place, and report on them with context and perspective. The determination about what images are appropriate and will be broadcast will be made by NBC News management after the event happens.”

All of that is, of course, a cop-out because the networks knew very well what images they would get and they knew what those images would do globally. No doubt they prayed real hard the event would get canceled so they wouldn’t have to make the tough decisions. Fox News, on the other hand, was quite blunt about what it would do – there would not be coverage. "If we tried to cover everyone who wants us to stick a camera in front of them, we'd run out of cameras pretty fast each day. But this is really about just using some judgment," senior VP Michael Clemente said.

Bill Keller, New York Times executive editor, told his staffers, “We have no policy against publishing things that might offend someone — lots of people are offended by lots of things — but we try to refrain from giving widespread offense unless there is some offsetting journalistic purpose. A picture of a burning book contributes nothing substantial to a story about book-burning, so the offense seems entirely gratuitous. The freedom to publish includes the freedom not to publish.”

If that preacher had done the deed someone would have taken video, even with a mobile phone, and that video would have found its way onto the Internet and the hell would have broken out. But news organizations claim that one of the great benefits of reading and watching their news is that they employ editors to make tough editorial choices, and this was the time they would have earned their salaries.

The Swiss German language public television second channel this week showed the grizzly Brian dePalma film Redacted in which a captured American soldier in Iraq is shown having his throat cut by his terrorist captors and then his severed head is held up to the camera. It was repulsive in the extreme but having that reaction to that scene gives one an inkling to the reactions elsewhere if the Quran burning had gone ahead.