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Does free media have an obligation to Islam?

In the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks, both America's paper of record (The New York Times) and its network of record (CNN) have declined to show Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad on the grounds that they might offend Muslims. The decision to forgo publication of these highly relevant news images has sparked a robust debate about free speech, religion and media ethics. One question that seems to have been glossed over is whether or not the media have any obligations to the preferences of a religious group, or any group of people, in the first place.

As previously noted, the Times has a history of publishing artwork and cartoons that have offended both Jews and Christians. See its coverage of Chris Ofili's "The Holy Virgin Mary" in 1999, which very much offended the Catholic League; an Iranian exhibition of "anti-Jewish art" in 2006; and an Iranian cartoonist's "anti-Jewish caricatures" in 2010. So, at least up until Dean Baquet's tenure as executive editor, which began last year, the Times' policy against "gratuitous insult" did not preclude offensive religious images.

The image of the prophet Muhammad, however, seems to occupy its own category, with its own rules. Last week, Baquet told me via email that as editor of the Times he had to consider "the Muslim family in Brooklyn who read us and is offended by any depiction of what he sees as his prophet." [sic] When I replied, "I just wonder about the Jewish family in Brooklyn," Baquet responded as follows:

I would really do some reporting --- I did -- to make sure these parallels are similar for the two religions.You may find they are not. In fact they really are not.

Baquet's argument, if I'm reading him correctly, is that a cartoonish depiction of Muhammad is more offensive, categorically, than a cartoon that depicts, say, anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews trying to fabricate a Holocaust that, per the cartoonist, never took place.

The actual dictates of Islam are more nuanced than Baquet's reporting may suggest. In today's Times, contributing opinion writer Mustafa Akyol notes that the Quran, "the only source in Islamic law that all Muslims accept indisputably," is quite specific about the appropriate response to those who would mock the prophet.

"[C]onspicuously, the Quran decrees no earthly punishment for blasphemy — or for apostasy (abandonment or renunciation of the faith), a related concept," Akyol writes. "Nor, for that matter, does the Quran command stoning, female circumcision or a ban on fine arts. All these doctrinal innovations, as it were, were brought into the literature of Islam as medieval scholars interpreted it, according to the norms of their time and milieu."

"Before all that politically motivated expansion and toughening of Shariah," Akyol continues, "the Quran told early Muslims, who routinely faced the mockery of their faith by pagans: 'God has told you in the Book that when you hear God’s revelations disbelieved in and mocked at, do not sit with them until they enter into some other discourse; surely then you would be like them.'"

If it were merely a matter of "not sitting" with the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo -- that is, if there was no threat of gunshots or firebombs, but rather just angry press releases from concerned Muslim organizations -- one wonders whether Baquet would be moved to take the concerns of the Muslim family in Brooklyn more seriously than the concerns of the other families in Brooklyn... Jewish, Christian, Chinese or African-American.

Which returns us to the question: Does a free media have an obligation to respect the preferences of a religious group, or any group? I certainly don't have the answer to that question. But it stands to reason that if a free media has an obligation to not offend one group, then it has an obligation to not offend all groups -- right down to restricting profanity in order to satisfy the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Otherwise, it's hard not to feel like the decisions being made at the Times are in reaction to potential threats, rather than in accordance with ethical or editorial standards.