Self-Censorship!

I’m a David Carr fan.  What he writes about media in the New York Times is usually interesting and insightful – worth reading.  So it was in a piece I read today, in which he makes a case for freedom of expression.

The starting point for what he talks about is the latest edition of Charlie Hebdo, the first since the terrorist attack on its people.  Instead of their usual print run of 60,000 they printed 3 million copies and then an additional 2 million to meet the demand.

Two large pictures accompanied Carr’s column.  One would assume that the cover of the magazine under discussion would be in one of the pictures.  No way.  He described what the cover looks like, but we saw no image of it.  I saw it somewhere, maybe on TV, but in looking for it in the newspapers I read, the Times, the Wall St. Journal, and the San Francisco Chronicle, it hasn’t appeared.

This is not an accident.  Either there is an unpublicized agreement in the media to not print it or the publications are fearful that printing it is dangerous and not worth the risk – or both.  In any event, the bad guys win this round.  Who needs government censorship when self-censorship gets the job done? 

This cowardly behavior is shameful!