So, the outrage over the Danish cartoons has grown since I last posted my question about how liberal-minded folks feel about the whole thing
here.
Editor & Publisher has an interesting piece here.
From the first bullet in that piece:
* Four top editors at the New York Press, a weekly in New York City, resigned Tuesday after being ordered, they claim, to pull the Danish cartoons -- from an issue that centers on the dispute. Editor in chief Harry Siegel charged that the Press leadership "has suborned its own professed principles. For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization."
More....
Now I don't know if I can agree on HOW offensive the cartoons are, but I still ask the question:
How sensitive should (not by law, but by propriety) newspapers or other media outlets be to the sensitivities of particular groups?
I tend to think that they shouldn't be particularly sensitive. I guess I for one would want to condemn more vocally and with more conviction the violence that came out of the protests over the cartoons than the cartoons themselves.
Oh, and yes I've seen the version of them posted on Wikipedia. I don't want to get into their quality or appropriateness, but more to the point of where liberal-minded, progressive members of democratic societies come down on this issue. I also think the discussion of comparable incidents in Wikipedia is interesting.
Should there be condemnation? If so, who or what should be condemned? Are the cartoons offensive? How should that be decided?
Should an editor lose his or her job over a decision to publish the cartoons? How vocal would you be in opposing or supporting the removal of an editor that published them?
Oh, and the question mark in the title is there on purpose. How does believing that Muhammed was a prophet affect your perception of this "issue?" How does your belief or lack of belief in God affect it?