Troubling news from honest editors

In Jeff Jacoby’s Feb. 19 Boston Globe column:

The Phoenix is Boston's leading ''alternative" newspaper, the kind of brash, pull-no-punches weekly that might have been expected to print without hesitation the Mohammed cartoons that Islamists have been using to incite rage and riots across the Muslim world.

Its willingness to push the envelope was memorably demonstrated in 2002, when it broke with most media to publish a grisly photograph of Daniel Pearl's severed head, and supplied a link on its website to the sickening video of the Wall Street Journal reporter's beheading.

But the Phoenix isn't publishing the Mohammed drawings, and in a brutally candid editorial it explained why.

''Our primary reason," the editors confessed, is ''fear of retaliation from . . . bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do . . . Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and . . . could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy.

As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year-publishing history."
...

Every one of us who values democracy is saddened by The Phoenix’s decision. And worried, too, because The Phoenix editors are part of that very large group of American news editors who’ve been frightened into not publishing the cartoons.

We are in a war for democracy and just about all American news organizations are in retreat or have been captured.

We need to turn things around. The best way to do that would be to have a "No Intimidation Day" on which all American bloggers and news organizations would publish or link to the cartoons.

As for The Phoenix editors, they were honest with readers. No piffle about “civic relevancy” and “competing public interests in play.” Their honesty on that matter separates them from most of their professional peers.

You can read Jacoby’s column here.

Thank you to Mike Williams for pointing out Jacoby's column.

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