Allah:
Like I said: Terrorism works. The future will not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.
In fact, in the future, maybe our media will refer to him as “the Prophet” without further description. If you’re going to live by one Muslim standard, you might as well live by all of them.
[Senior CNN editorial director Richard] Griffiths’ email:
Although we are not at this time showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet considered offensive by many Muslims, platforms are encouraged to verbally describe the cartoons in detail. This is key to understanding the nature of the attack on the magazine and the tension between free expression and respect for religion.
Video or stills of street protests showing Parisians holding up copies of the offensive cartoons, if shot wide, are also OK. Avoid close-ups of the cartoons that make them clearly legible.
It’s also OK to show most of the protest cartoons making the rounds online, though care should be taken to avoid examples that include within them detailed depictions of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
This isn’t the first time American news networks have refused to show images of Mohammed, as the boss emeritus points out, but that tremulous “if shot wide” in the excerpt above is a perfectly absurd little coup de grace. I saw someone tweet earlier this afternoon that they’d rather see news outlets avoid this story entirely than betray the martyred Hebdo staff by refusing to transmit the images they died defending. I agree. There’s a shred of honesty in a total blackout, an acknowledgement that if a journalist can’t cover a story without restrictions he shouldn’t cover it at all. To repeat the point I made in the post about Obama’s 2012 speech, I can tolerate caving to jihadi sensibilities so long as there’s some shame involved. Blacking out the story entirely would signal shame. Refusing to do close-ups of a crowd of people mourning satirists murdered in the name of censorship because you fear you might pick up one or two of the offending drawings doesn’t.
Oh, incidentally, NBC and its affiliates won’t be showing the cartoons either:
https://twitter.com/RosieGray/status/552945793075003392
Fox News aired showed one this morning but has “no plans” to show them again as I’m writing this. All of this was predictable. This, unfortunately, was predictable too: