By the time I was on the air with KIRO's Dave Ross (I'd already been on KOMO and KVI that day defending The Stranger's decision to print four of the infamous Muhammad cartoons alongside our full-page story on the controversy), it occurred to me that I wasn't the one that should be on the radio. The Stranger had simply done what newspapers are supposed to do: publish the news with all its thorny subject matter and ugly images intact. The people who should have been in the radio hot seat last week were the editors from the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the Seattle Weeklyâlocal papers that weighed in on the story but had avoided its central images. Their decisionâto censor the newsâwas the controversial one. They should have to defend that.
I quickly explained The Stranger's decision: We printed the cartoons because they were the centerpiece of a major news story; we printed the cartoons because it would've been unconvincing for us to pontificate about freedom of speech without simultaneously exercising freedom of speech; and finally, we didn't consider the images to be gratuitous like, say, a swastika randomly grafittied on a wall, because from the start these drawings took place in a topical contextâthey were commissioned as a political protest against the repressive agenda of radical Islam which had created a chill in Denmark and now, it seemed, had created a chill in Seattle, which prides itself on honoring diversity of thought.
Then I raised the more important point. Rather than questioning our decision to give readers the opportunity to see what all the fuss was about, Ross should be grilling the Seattle Times for its decision to put a burqa on free speech.
"You're absolutely right," the gleeful, baritone-voiced Ross hollered, spinning in his swivel chair at his radio command center, and flagging his producer through the glass booth.
Soon enough, Seattle Times executive editor Mike Fancher was on the phone getting cross-examined by Ross.
Fancher said they didn't publish the cartoons because it would have been "offensive." "What does the reader expect of the Seattle Times? What level of scrutiny and judgment and sensitivity?" Fancher asked rhetorically. "We're going to make the best decisions we can on behalf of our total readership."
Does Fancher's total readership include Jews who might be offended when the Seattle Times reprints Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's offensive but newsworthy statements that the holocaust was a myth? Does Fancher's total readership include families of U.S. troops who might be offended when the Seattle Times prints the shocking but newsworthy photos of American coffins? Does Fancher's readership include Christians and Muslims who might be offended when the Times publishes pictures of newsworthy gay couples advocating gay marriage?
Certainly, it does. And yet the Seattle Times has correctly risked offending those readers. After all, trying not to piss off readers is at cross purposes with covering the news. Sparing local Muslims isn't treating them with sensitivity, it's treating them with condescension.
