Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple isn’t buying the media line that they are opposed to showing “deliberately offensive” images. “Compelling as these arguments may sound, they boil down to a refusal to show the world as it is, to explain how events have evolved. They also express the mainstream media’s long-held belief in the fragility and naivete of its audience.”
But Wemple is especially harsh on CNN. Remember how CNN boss Jeff Zucker boasted "We're not going to be shamed into it by others who have political beliefs that want to try to have temper tantrums to shame other news organizations into covering something,” in this case, the Benghazi hearings (CNN avoided live coverage). But radical Muslims can sway him. His blog was headlined “Fear of terrorism is driving CNN’s editorial decisions.”
According to a story by CNNers Brian Stelter and Tom Kludt, Zucker opened an editorial meeting this morning with the following message: “‘Journalistically, every bone says we want to use and should use’ the cartoons, Zucker said. But ‘as managers, protecting and taking care of the safety of our employees around the world is more important right now.’”
Which amounts to an admission that fear of terrorism is driving CNN’s editorial decisions.
CNN has thousands of news staffers, so:
If anyone out there should be concerned about exposing people to international terrorism, in other words, it’s Zucker.
Yet his capitulation to fear doesn’t withstand scrutiny on any level. As to the suggestion that somehow self-censoring the Charlie Hebdo drawings protects Zucker’s foreign correspondents, consider what little provocation brings deadly consequences: The Islamic State terror group beheaded an aid worker; it beheaded freelance journalists. Those incidents served as a warning that any journalist — any Westerner — who falls into the hands of the enemy is in extreme danger overseas. CNN’s front-liners were at risk before the Charlie Hebdo affair, and they’ll be at risk after the Charlie Hebdo affair, without regard to how CNN treats the magazine’s controversial drawings. For that matter, people sitting in their offices in Paris are obviously at risk now, too.
Plus: CNN is in the business of taking calculated risks to bring the truth to the public. This is one calculation that misfired.
To older media watchers, Zucker is starting to sound a little like his predecessor Eason Jordan, who admitted in 2003 that he had withheld harsh news of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship for almost a decade from Iraq so CNN could maintain a (limp) presence there. “Profile in courage” is not the term that comes to mind.
