Last week the publication I work for, the German newsweekly Die Zeit, printed one of the controversial caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. It was the right thing to do. When the cartoons were first published in Denmark in September, nobody in Germany took notice. Had our publication been offered the drawings at that point, in all likelihood we would have declined to print them. At least one of them seems to equate Islam with radical Islamism. That is exactly the direction nobody wants the debate about fundamentalism to take — even though the very nature of a political cartoon is overstatement. We would not have printed the caricature out of a sense of moderation and respect for the Muslim minority in our country. News people make judgments about taste all the time. We do not show sexually explicit pictures or body parts after a terrorist attack. We try to keep racism and anti-Semitism out of the paper. Freedom of the press comes with a responsibility. But the criteria change when material that is seen as offensive becomes newsworthy. That’s why we saw bodies falling out of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. That’s why we saw […]
Tuesday, February 7th, 2006
Tolerance Toward Intolerance
Author: THOMAS KLEINE-BROCKHOFF
Source: Washington Post
Publication Date: Tuesday, February 7, 2006; A21
Link: Tolerance Toward Intolerance
Source: Washington Post
Publication Date: Tuesday, February 7, 2006; A21
Link: Tolerance Toward Intolerance
Stephan: Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff is the Washington bureau chief of the German newsweekly Die Zeit.