The New York Times Saturday Morning Courage

Anyone who has ever worked in finance or politics is aware of the temptation to release bad news on Friday afternoon. This ensures that the bad news appears first in the Saturday newspapers, the least read paper of the week.  Accordingly, both the bad news itself and the cowardly late Friday release get lost in the weekend and, by the time Monday rolls around, your bad news gets trumped by something fresher and hopefully more distracting.  The media complains (for an example of that, see here), but that just makes it all the more fun.

If the world needed any more proof that the MSM is no different than those it pretends to neutrally report on, it should consider the way in which Saturday editorials have become the MSM version of news dumping.  In this context, "bad news" is an editorial position that the editors find embarrassing but necessary under the circumstances.   With its Saturday editorial about the Danish cartoon controversy, the NYT set a new standard of excellence relative to "editorial dumping." 

As the entire world is aware, the NYT had very little to say in support of free speech back when it might have made a difference in the Danish cartoon controversy. To the contrary, the NYT condemned the publication of the cartoons by Denmark's Jyllands Post and advocated that journalists treat Islam with exquisite sensitivity. Although many other journalists in the US and around the world followed that example, many did not.  Predictably, some of the journalists that defended free expression have been silenced. .

Until yesterday, and as one might expect under the circumstances, the NYT has been pretty quiet about all that.  Now that it has finally said something, the world has a whole new benchmark for the word "craven."  The chicanery begins in the first sentence,

"With every new riot over the Danish cartoons, it becomes clearer that the protests are no longer about the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, but about the demagoguery of Islamic extremists."

As the NYT is well aware, the protests have never been about the cartoons nor, for that matter, can the cartoons fairly be called "caricatures" of Muhhamad. To anyone not in an intellectual coma, the protests have always been about the right of a paper to print something that others find offensive. Now that this has become embarrassingly clear, the NYT realized that something had to be done to get itself on the right side of journalism history.

Rather than use the editorial to address its previous position with respect to speech that is offensive to the followers of the "Prophet Muhammad" (which differs, readers will recall, from its position relative to speech that is offensive to anyone else), an effort that would probably require a special supplement, the NYT engages in some fairly impressive revisionism. First it minimizes its previous role in the controversy:

"It is not the West that is most threatened in this crisis. The voices of moderation in the Muslim world are the ones that are being intimidated and silenced."

You see, it's the voices in the Muslim world that are being intimidated and silenced, not the NYT.  It gets better:

"Those few journalists and leaders who have spoken out against the rioting have been vilified and assailed, and even jailed."

If the journalists had simply "spoken out against the rioting", they wouldn't be in jail. The NYT puts it this way in order to avoid having to say, "those few journalists who have published the cartoons...." This also has the effect of suggesting that, unlike back when it had the opportunity to speak out against violence and intimidation, the cartoons have now become newsworthy.  All in all, not a bad piece of work. The NYT has distanced itself from itself, asserted its support for free expression and a free press, and laid the foundation for publishing the cartoons if the rioting should continue. 

Soldiers talk about the kind of instinctive courage that some men have under fire. Napoleon referred to this phenomenon as "two o'clock in the morning courage" and noted that it is the rarest kind.  Applying that principle here, it's interesting to note that the NYT instinctive reaction to the Danish cartoon controversy was to boldly run away.  Given that notorious display of cowardice, it's not surprising that the NYT chose to share its "Saturday morning courage" with as few of its readers as possible.

Comments

[Frank P]

Good post, good blog. As I picked you up from your comment on The Daily Ablution, I suggest that you add it to your sidebar. The Ablutionists are good people.