Well, I was right: A ton of people did show up at tonight’s Hesperia City Council meeting, and it did go longish. I counted two extra rows of folding chairs put out for the audience and a total turn-out just shy of 150 residents, not including city, fire and police staff who have to be there. But not everyone spoke, and I got out of there at what would be an early time for a school board meeting.
Memo to self: Be very happy that I don’t write editorials, just news stories.
More on the Danish Mohammed cartoons: Syndicated cartoonist Ted Rall blasts the “nanny media” for failing to print the Mohammed cartoon. (For those who don’t know his work, Rall is a left-of-center cartoonist.)
As the only syndicated political cartoonist who also writes a syndicated column, my living depends on freedom of the press. I can’t decide who’s a bigger threat: the deluded Islamists who hope to impose Sharia law on Western democracies, or the right-wing clash-of-civilization crusaders waving the banner of “free speech”–the same folks who call for the censorship and even murder of anti-Bush cartoonists here–as an excuse to join the post-9/11 Muslims-suck media pile-on. Most reasonable people reject both–but neither is as dangerous to liberty as America’s self-censoring newspaper editors and broadcast producers.
“CNN has chosen not to show the [Danish Mohammed] cartoons out of respect for Islam,” said the news channel.
“We always weigh the value of the journalistic impact against the impact that publication might have as far as insulting or hurting certain groups,” said an editor at The San Francisco Chronicle.
“The cartoons didn’t meet our long-held standards for not moving offensive content,” said the Associated Press.
Bull—-.
If these cowards were worried about offending the faithful, they wouldn’t cover or quote such Muslim-bashers as Ann Coulter, Christopher Hitchens or George W. Bush. The truth is, our national nanny media is managed by cowards so terrified by the prospect of their offices being firebombed that they wallow in self-censorship.
Precisely because they subvert free speech from within with their oh-so-reasonable odes for “moderation” and against “sensationalism,” the gatekeepers of our national nanny media are more dangerous to Western values than distant mullahs and clueless neocons combined. Editors and producers decide not only what’s fit to print but also what’s not: flag-draped coffins and body bags arriving from Iraq, photographs of Afghan civilians, their bodies reduced to blobs of blood and protoplasm, all purged from our national consciousness. You might think it’s news when the vice president tells a senator to “go f— yourself” on the Senate floor, but you’d be wrong–only tortured roundabout descriptions (like “f—“) make newsprint. “This is a family newspaper,” any editor will say, arguing for self-censorship–as if kids couldn’t fill in those three letters in “f—.”
As if kids read the paper.
(My mom sent me that link. When you’re a reporter, everyone you know eventually turns into a media critic. Fortunately, most of the people in my life no longer blame me for something that CNN said — or didn’t say — or whatever idiocy occurs on the LA television news shows.)
Interesting, the Columbia Journalism Review, one of the most respected (and most harsh) of media critics, has been silent on the issue, despite banging the drums for better journalism on every other subject (including lots of chatter about the Cheney shooting coverage). That’s both surprising and disappointing.
I don’t think a lot of people noticed this story on the Daily Press Web site this week or, if they did, grasped its importance. Maybe I’m wrong. But it is important, and (hopefully) points the way towards an exciting new era for the Daily Press, Hesperia Star, Desert Dispatch and other papers in our little corner of the Freedom Communications empire:
HESPERIA — One motorist was killed and another seriously injured early Wednesday morning in a crash that shut down all traffic on Main Street near Topaz for at least two hours.
An eastbound motorist apparently strayed onto the right curb, then overcorrected and veered to the left across all lanes before crashing into a westbound green Honda.
The motorist in the green Honda was killed, while the driver of the other car was airlifted to an area trauma center.
Other than not having a byline, pretty standard stuff for the Daily Press site, perhaps. Or perhaps not:
For more on the story, see Thursday’s Daily Press.
That line at the bottom referencing the full story the next day tells it all: This was news that was being published on the site between print editions and that would not, in this form, ever appear on paper.
Once upon a time, newspapers could afford to create “extra” editions, to let everyone know when major breaking news had occured. The economics of that practice, along with broadcast media that could do it faster and less expensively, killed it off pretty well. I’ve never been at a paper that printed an extra edition while I was there, although a few had in the past.
The Internet can change that.
So often invoked as the scary boogeyman by the old guard in the newspaper industry, the Internet is a printing press essentially without cost. Creating a new Web page for readers to view doesn’t cost measurably much more than having them read the page that you created several hours ago. And with that epiphany in hand, the industry can leverage newsgathering — particularly local newsgathering — that the broadcasting companies cannot, with a credibility that few bloggers/citizen journalists currently have. The biggest papers — the ones with more than three people on their New Media staffs — are already dipping their toes in this water, although mostly just with Associated Press feeds.
It was a small step. The Daily Press site is still static pages that have to be manually updated (hand-coded) to make a change or to add a story. Kate Rosenberg, or whoever wrote that initial breaking news piece, couldn’t just pull up a browser window on her computer in the newsroom and add the story, which an editor could then approve and send to the site.
But it’s the first step on a journey that could lead to some very exciting places. In 50 years, I don’t believe that anyone will differentiate between a print news company, a television news company or a radio news company. We will all be producing text, video and audio, which our readers will use as they wish. All the end-user wants is timely, accurate and convenient news. There’s no point in waiting 50 years for us to get there. So it’s exciting to begin that journey, no matter how large the step.
More steps to follow. Soon.
Daily Press editor Don Holland’s decision to run the Danish cartoon showing the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban has raised some eyebrows in the media, both regionally and nationally.
The mindless violence by Islamic radicals is par for the course. But what is incredible is that the Associated Press, which distributes news stories and photos from across the globe, has decided that you shouldn’t see it.
The Daily Press is one of the very few American newspapers that is publishing the cartoon. The point is not whether it is offensive or not. The point is that it is part of a worldwide news story.
The fact that radical Muslims are going berserk over a cartoon says more about their mindset than it does about a cartoon.
AP’s Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll says AP won’t “distribute content that is known to be offensive, with rare exceptions.”
What is offensive is that AP fancies itself to be the guardian of good taste for thousands of American newspapers rather than letting individual newspapers make that decision.
AP’s philosophy also strikes at the heart of a free press and the elementary principles of libertarian thought — that individuals have the God-given right to read what they please and decide for themselves what is and isn’t offensive.
AP has distributed countless controversial images, presumably without intending offense. But some could argue that the historic image of the Saigon police chief executing a Viet Cong spy was offensive. Years ago, the Daily Press received numerous calls when we published a photo of victims of the Rawandan genocide. Certainly that was a newsworthy, albeit disturbing, image.
To be fair, I’m not surprised that Don ran the cartoon. I’m mostly surprised that so few other newspapers have.
The old guard media-on-the-media publication, Editor & Publisher, specifically mentioned the Daily Press as one of four American papers listed to run the cartoon:
* A California paper, the Daily Press in Victorville, became one of the few to publish a Muhammad cartoon–the one with the prophet with a bomb in his turban–today, with its editor in a column knocking The Associated Press for refusing to distribute the images. Another small paper in Cheyenne, Wyoming, also published two of the cartoons, and also complained about the AP stance.
* Eric Mink, commentary editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, explains in a column today: “If a government controls what can and cannot be distributed, it’s called censorship. If a media outlet decides for itself what to include and exclude from its products — whether for journalistic or economic reasons, out of respect for possible sensitivities of some readers or concern about possible impact on its community — it’s called editorial judgment.
“Here in the United States, at least two major newspapers in the last week — the Austin American-Statesman and The Philadelphia Inquirer — chose to publish one of the original Danish cartoons to illustrate stories about the controversy and violence. Other papers, including the Post-Dispatch, have decided that the images aren’t necessary to communicate the story. It’s called judgment.”
The truth is, it’s not a particularly good cartoon. It’s only designed to upset Muslims, which it did. The Danish newspaper, which apparently has a history of these sorts of stunts, isn’t particularly heroic. If they were a poster on an Internet message board, they’d be considered a troll.
But the response to the cartoon is news. And to dance all around the thing that triggered the response is counter-intuitive and, in my opinion, shirking journalistic responsibility. As Don mentions in his editorial, this isn’t the first offensive image to run in a newspaper, because of its real or perceived news value. It likely won’t be the last. I think we will be poorer as a nation if our journalists refuse to cover news that makes them uncomfortable, even when it’s inarguably a real news story.
As promised, here are the other photos we submitted for the Society of Professional Journalists 2005 awards:
Photo by Peter Day. Published July 19, 2005.
Penny Hale wipes away a tear after opening a present from a group of teenagers who as toddlers were in Hale’s “Mommy and Me” class in 1993. Hale, who is retiring as an instructor for the Hesperia Recreation and Park District after 18 years, is heading toward a local teaching job. Numerous mommies and their children gave Hale an emotional send-off at Timberlane Park.
Photo by Dan Elliott. Published September 24, 2005.
The theme for the Hesperia Days Parade was “Tribute to our Military Families.” The parade started out colorfully and symbolically with Old Glory leading the way.
Photo by Peter Day. Published January 4, 2005.
Recreational kayaker Paul Covert braves the Mojave River as a stranded car tells the tale of an earlier near tragedy. According to the Hesperia Sheriff Station, a motorist had defied a posted warning and attempted to cross Rock Springs Road, which was deluged with rain water.
Photo by Peter Day. Published July 12, 2005.
Patricia Miller embraces Max, her chihuahua/terrier mix, after a structure fire destroyed her apartment unit on Sequoia Avenue in Hesperia.
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