The POLIS Summer School students have turned their multi-national attention to the hottest topic in media studies at the moment: the Danish Cartoons. What surprised me was the alacrity with which this group of largely intelligent and liberal people from around the world were willing to accept self-censorship. Most felt that the cartoons did not deserve publication and the rest seemed to accept the partial glimpses allowed in the British media. I am not a red-blooded freedom of speech man. Indeed, the edition of Channel 4 News that I played to them only gave the viewer 13 seconds of the actual cartoons to look at. You can view it online here. The BBC only showed 3″ filmed in a way that you could not really make them out. But as a journalist all my instincts are to publish and be damned. Most of the Summer School students come from ‘open’ societies, but it was actually our Danish colleague who was most against their publication.
I wonder if the reason for their reluctance to risk offence stems from a sophisticated form of tolerance, or the complacency of people who take liberal freedoms for granted? As we say here at the LSE, ‘discuss’.
Slightly unfair. Antonio and I especially felt very strongly that both the BBC and Channel 4 coverage didn’t go far enough in making the story explicit, either from a reporting/public-service point of view or in lending free-speech support to the other European media outlets that were coming under fire. We’re all for constructive offence, particularly as we agreed there was a certain amount of choice involved in whether individuals decided to take offence or not, and that the BBC coverage in particular was being used by some as a convenient excuse for the escalation of protests, rather than being a genuine cause of it. What we both objected to in general was targeted provocative offence for the sake of it, but while the Jyllands-Posten was possibly guilty of edging towards this (although I don’t think enough to warrant a full apology), the resulting coverage was a long way off – further than it needed to be in our opinion. Additionally, I think we all viewed the exercise as being a question of what we would have done were we to have been responsible for the decision at the BBC or Channel 4 that day, rather than what our gut instincts told us to go for. Which, as your experience showed, are not always the same thing.