“All is forgiven” reads the cover of the latest edition of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine.
Asked about Monty Python’s sometimes offensive humor, John Cleese once replied, “There are some people one rather wishes to offend.”
Quite so. In the same way, there also are people one would prefer not to offend, at least not without good cause.
Charlie Hebdo, the French humor publication attacked last week for the crime of causing offense, left few targets unscarred. Causing offense has been the publication’s capital stock, and the murderous attack on its staff roused even many of Charlie Hebdo’s targets to rise to its defense.
Other media outlets were criticized for failing to reprint some of the cartoons that had stirred the ire of Islamic extremists. But maintaining standards against public pressure includes the courage not to publish just as explicitly as the courage to publish.
When a police officer trying to prevent the carnage was gunned down in the street, every media outlet I saw blurred the image of the terrorist firing the fatal shot at point-blank range. That’s called taste, something that occasionally escaped the editors and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.
David Crisp
That is, perhaps, the most important reason why they must be defended. Even those of us who are sensitive to questions of taste need the leavening influence of those who are not.
Defending offensive speech comes with a price. Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who helped Edward Snowden expose American secrets to the world, drove home the point by posting a long series of highly offensive anti-Semitic cartoons. Many of them would have been welcomed in the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter.
Greenwald’s simple point: If you are going to defend offensive speech, start by defending speech that offends you.
Americans might well recall that our own history of standing up for journalists’ right to offend is not so old as we like to think. In 1835, newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison literally had a noose around his neck before police intervened to break up a mob in Boston. His offensive opinion was that being born with black skin was insufficient cause to be subjected to a life of slavery.
In 1837, abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy was killed by a shotgun blast fired from a mob intent on destroying his new printing press—new because mobs already had destroyed three others. No one was ever prosecuted for the crimes.
In 1861, newspaper editor Nathan Morse, who had sympathized with the Southern cause, escaped by crawling out a third-floor window while 500 rioters hurled his printing press and type into the street below.
In that panicky summer of 1861, Harold Holzer writes in “Lincoln and the Power of the Press,” “some two hundred newspapers and their editors were identified, menaced, arrested, imprisoned, humiliated, bankrupted, mobbed or sacked.” Rarely was anyone prosecuted for the crimes, and the government itself was often involved in the crackdowns. That the First Amendment survived, Holzer writes, was something of a miracle.
In Waco, Texas, William Cowper Brann, editor of the Iconoclast, was kidnapped, whipped, threatened by a lynch mob and finally shot to death in 1898, in part for his relentless attacks on Baptists, Baylor University and students he characterized as “intellectual eunuchs, who couldn’t father an idea if cast bodily into the womb of the goddess of wisdom.”
During World War I in Montana, Dennis L. Swibold writes in “Copper Chorus,” managers at the Butte Bulletin were arrested for sedition after they vigorously argued against a law licensing Montana newspapers. The Bulletin’s offices were raided, and the federal War Industries Board blocked the newspaper’s plans to expand to daily publication.
As recently as 2005, talk radio yakkers argued that New York Times editors and reporters should be tried for treason for printing government secrets. Since treason is a crime that has been punished by death in this country, that would put a fatal contemporary twist on differences of opinion about what is proper to publish.
But at least that would have been done under color of law, just like the 1,000 lashes—50 lashes a week for 20 weeks—now being administered in Saudi Arabia to a blogger convicted of insulting Islam. The blogger, Raif Badawi, also was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay a fine of about $266,600.
Such punishment would be unthinkable these days in America. Most of us would agree with the sentiment expressed in the world’s most famous sentence in defense of freedom of speech: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
That sentence is often, inaccurately, attributed to a Frenchman, Voltaire, who viciously attacked both Christianity and Islam. Now we have terrorists in France who are willing to die to prevent offense to their religion. And we have lovers of liberty who say they are willing to die to protect the right to offend.
How we overcome that impasse without more bullets being fired is beyond me. In America, even a civil war did not quite get the job done.
David Crisp has worked for newspapers since 1979. He has been editor and publisher of the Billings Outpost since 1997.
