November 22, 2006
Silencing the truth
Sir Harold Evans, the legendary former editor of the Sunday Times, recorded a telling incident – indeed, it was actually quite astounding – in a speech he gave recently to the Hudson Institute, as reported here by the New York Sun:

When I spoke at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival a couple of years back and criticized newspapers that headlined suicide bombers as martyrs, I was told by two angry leading intellectuals that I had lived too long in America. Something similar happened at this year’s Hay-on-Wye festival, sponsored by the Guardian, where a five-person panel discussed ‘Are there are any limits to free speech?’ One of the Muslim panelists said if anyone offended his religion, he would strike him. A lawyer, Anthony Julius, responded that Jews had lived as minorities under two powerful hegemonies, Christian and Muslim, and had been obliged to learn how to deal nonviolently with offense caused to them by the sacred scriptures of both. He started by referring to an anti-Semitic passage in the New Testament — which passed without comment. But when he began to list the passages in the Koran that denigrate Jews, describing them as monkeys and pigs, the panelists went ballistic. One of them, Madeline Bunting of the Guardian, put her hand over the microphone and said words to the effect, ‘I am not going to sit here and listen to any criticisms of Muslims.’ She was cheered, and not one of the journalists in the audience from right or left uttered a word about free speech — not hate speech, mind you, but free speech of a moderate nature.

…The free pass is extraordinary in light of the deaths in Britain, the conviction last week of a man plotting to blow up the London subways, and the public warning last week by the head of British intelligence, who traditionally remains anonymous, that 30 more plots were in the offing. These are the topics that should be worrying the press and broadcast organizations — that for all their brilliant staffers, resources, and reputation for authenticity, they can be fooled, and it is left to investigative web sites to shout foul. In the Lebanon war this past summer, celebrated newspapers and television stations worldwide carried pictures showing that Israel had targeted two International Red Cross ambulances — a fabrication of Hezbollah that investigative Web sites ultimately exposed.

At least one newspaperman grasps that, rather than its historic mission to tell truth to power, the media now uses its enormous power to silence the truth.