Two unrelated incidents — the hunting accident involving Vice President Richard Cheney and the furor in the Muslim world over the Mohammed cartoons — both spotlight failures of the media that deserve examining.
I'm not a big Cheney fan. I take issue with the Vice President over the war in Iraq and other matters. As for Muslim mobs which take to rioting and burning when provoked, their unspeakable behavior is a painful illustration of why prospects for dialogue with Islam often seem daunting.
But granting all that — what about the media?
Let's start with Cheney. When the Vice President of the United States shoots a friend in a hunting accident, that's news. Cheney's decision to delay telling the press, which presumably was prompted by a need to collect himself, was a surprisingly amateurish mistake for a man who's been in the spotlight as long as he has.
But, that said, the response of the media — column after column, hour after hour, of repetitious news and commentary — was wildly disproportionate to the significance of the event. More than that, the vicious pile-on humor of TV comics and the sheer nastiness of Op-Ed commentators exceeded any reasonable bounds. Cheney, it frequently was said, was out of control. But a lot of the time it was the media that were over the edge.
How explain that? The competitive dynamics of the media business, where someone who downplays a story others make much of risks embarrassment or worse, have much to do with it. But something else also was at work.
For various reasons, many people in the elite media do not like the Vice President and the administration in which he serves, and they are happy to do injury to both when the occasion arises. The hunting accident was a glorious opportunity to trash Dick Cheney. Everything else followed from that.
Now let's turn to the Mohammed cartoons, published in a Danish daily last September, then in some other European papers over the next several months. Angry Muslims aside, their publication has been condemned — by Pope Benedict XVI, for one — and also defended. It's the defenders who worry me.
Part of the heritage of the West, we've heard repeatedly, is the media's right to offend — a right sometimes specified as the right to blaspheme. But the great American constitutionalist Joseph Story concluded in the 19th century that blasphemy is a common-law crime. Doesn't that apply to the press?
For the cartoons' defenders the answer apparently is no. They mindlessly absolutize freedom of the press, arguing, or simply taking for granted, that it's a supreme value that takes precedence over everything else. (Except, possibly, whatever other value or values the absolutizers — absolutizing their own preferences and tastes — choose to treat as privileged exceptions to their rule. For some, the “right to choose” is a current example of that.)
But freedom of the press, critically important though it is, is an instrumental value, not an absolute. The rationale for press freedom lies in the basic human purposes it's meant to protect and serve: things like truth, justice, community, religion. The bottom line is that those angry Muslims were wrong to riot but right to be outraged.
Are these two episodes linked? It would be foolish to push the connection too far, but at least there's this: In a better world, the powerful instrument of press freedom would be entrusted only to those wise enough to use it with self-restraint; in the hands of the ignorant, the arrogant, and the immature it becomes a dangerous weapon.
Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, DC. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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