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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Media : Right Wing |
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DI Editors: Two Week Suspension Pending Further Review |
Current rating: 0 |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
14 Feb 2006
Modified: 05:21:04 PM |
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WILL AM580 reports that the two Daily Illini editors who decided to publish cartoons offensive to Muslims have been suspended for two weeks pending a review of the incident. |
WILL AM580 reports that the two Daily Illini editors who decided to publish cartoons offensive to Muslims have been suspended for two weeks pending a review of the incident.
Acton Gorton, editor in chief, and Chuck Prochaska, opinions editor, apparently made a unilateral decision to publish the cartoons without approval of the DI editorial board. This board totals seven, including the suspended editors, and is supposed to make decisions by a majority. Apparently, the two editors were unable to figure out that 2 is not greater than 50% of 7.
While the suspended continue to assert that the incident is about "free speech" this justification seems about as plausible as arguing that the civil rights movement in the American South in the 1950s was primarily a state's rights issue.
Students marched in protest at the University this afternoon shortly before the suspensions were announced. The incident has resulted in a flood of criticism within the university over the intentionally inflamed controversy being inimical to its mission and ethos, from the chancellor on down to ordinary students of all -- and no-- belief in god, along with a few pats on the back from the likes of the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.
The suspended editors' actions not so coincidentally echo the opinions of a host of racist and merely conservative commentators and blogs, a rather far and dramatic overreach for two editors of a paper that is supposed to reflect the university community's diversity and openess to efficacious dialogue. |
Related stories on this site:
Cartoon controversy hits U. of I.
Urban Guerrilla Blog: U of I published anti-Islam cartoons
March against cartoons!
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Re: DI Editors: Two Week Suspension Pending Further Review |
by yes yes but
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
15 Feb 2006
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I deplore the cartoons, I deplore the decision of the DI staffers to print them. I deplore racism. But -- it is inimical to my view of my constitutional rights to intone "Free speech yes -- hate speech no." Hate speech is hateful, but it's still free speech. I recall Irwin Kroll, the late great publisher of "The Progressive" at a conference on campus about twenty years ago, wondering if he was the only free-speech absolutist in the room. Am I the only one here now who believes that all speech -- no matter how hateful, vicious or offensive -- should be protected? |
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Free Speech Not the Real Issue |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
15 Feb 2006
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It amazes me that conservatives, so quick to defend property rights in the face of human rights, are so clueless here. The issue is not really about free speech, except in terms of the sloganeering of the defenders of this usurpation of power by Gorton and Prochaska.
Free speech is about governmental controls, not about what some private entity decides to say or not say in their editorial pages. Much of the time what some people think of as free speech is only the freedom of those who own the press to set an agenda of what they want to publish.
The DI's rogue editors ironically decided to break this rule of propertyholders and got burned. They failed to go through established procedure and took things into their own hands. This can lead to loss of employment, whether you're working at the DI or Fox News. Which is what is most hilarious about this.
These two are going to have a lot of explaining to do before anyone anywhere else gives them any control over content again. They may have to settle for getting a job as a Bush political commisar at someplace like NASA to make sure that scientists don't come up with any science that makes a Bush policy look bad. But they better hurry. I think everyone senses a change in the wind on the American political landscape, due to similar Republican over-reaching in many other areas of public policy.
Besides, didn't Acton and Chuck get the memo from the White House on this issue to stop making it more difficult on Bush's already struggling war on (for?) democracy in the Middle East? These Republican vigilantes probably got burned as much for not following the Republican Party line as they did for getting out of line in the DI news room. In any case, for two people so enamored of the primacy of property rights, they're absolutely clueless -- as seem many of their supporters -- of how this stuff works in real life once you are forced to step back from their cheerleading for a culture war. |
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Re: Free Speech Not the Real Issue |
by oz
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
16 Feb 2006
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good points as usual. |
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Re: DI Editors: Two Week Suspension Pending Further Review |
by downward spiral
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
17 Feb 2006
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ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistani Muslim cleric and his followers offered rewards amounting to over $1 million for anyone who killed Danish cartoonists who drew caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad that have enraged Muslims worldwide.
The cleric offered the bounty during Friday prayers as Muslim anger against the cartoons flared anew in parts of Asia.
Weeks of global protests over the cartoons have triggered fears of a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam, and have led to calls on all sides for calm.
On Friday, thousands rallied in Pakistan, police in Bangladesh blocked demonstrators heading for the Danish embassy in Dhaka and in the Indian city of Hyderabad, police fired teargas shells and batons to beat back hundreds of protesters, who had stoned shops and disrupted traffic.
Protests in Pakistan this week have resulted in at least five deaths and hundreds of detentions, and on Friday it became the latest country where Denmark has decided to temporarily close its embassy.
The Danish foreign ministry also issued a travel warning for Pakistan, urging any Danes to leave as soon as possible.
In the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, cleric Maulana Yousef Qureshi said he had personally offered to pay a bounty of 500,000 rupees ($8,400) to anyone who killed a Danish cartoonist, and two of his congregation put up additional rewards of $1 million and one million rupees plus a car.
"If the West can place a bounty on Osama bin Laden and Zawahri we can also announce reward for killing the man who has caused this sacrilege of the holy Prophet," Qureshi told Reuters, referring to the al Qaeda leader and his deputy Ayman al Zawahri.
The cleric leads the congregation at the historic Mohabat mosque, on street known for goldsmith shops in the provincial capital of North West Frontier Province -- a stronghold of Pakistan's Islamist opposition parties.
The cartoons were first published in Denmark last September, but last month newspapers and magazines in Europe and elsewhere began republishing to assert principles of freedom of expression.
Muslims believe images of the Prophet are forbidden. |
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Reprint This: New Abu Ghraib Abuse Photos Broadcast in Australia |
by via AP
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
17 Feb 2006
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If DI editors want to challenge a repressive system and their right to defy censorship in a way that really puts something at risk in defense of allowing the public to see what most of the press is keeping out of public sight, why don't they print the newly released photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison? Afterall, we can't control what the hell a rightwing Danish newspaper does or what a few wackos in the street in Pakistan might do, but I'd like to think we do control what our own government does. Or at least we'd have a fighting chance of taking down those who torture in our name if their crimes were known to us, instead of being covered up.
New Abu Ghraib Abuse Photos Broadcast in Australia
An Australian television network today broadcast photographs and video clips it said were previously unpublished images of the alleged abuse of Iraqis held in military custody at Abu Ghraib prison.
The images were taken at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 at about the same time as previously published photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse, the Special Broadcasting Service's "Dateline" programme reported.
The images shown by SBS were consistent with the earlier photographs, which triggered outrage at alleged abuse by soldiers, a congressional investigation and military trials for some of those involved.
No one in the images broadcast today could clearly by identified as military personnel. But men wearing combat-style uniforms and holding dogs on leashes appear in at least one of the images.
Many of them were more graphic than the images published earlier, showing apparently dead bodies, injuries and sexual acts.
One of the video clips shown by SBS was of a group of naked men with bags over their heads standing together, masturbating. Another video showed a man repeatedly beating himself against a wall.
Among the photographs, one showed a man with a deep cut on his neck, and another of the same man surrounded by men dressed in khaki shirts and pants, with one of the men pointing at the wound.
SBS said the images were among photographs the American Civil Liberties Union was trying to obtain from the government under a Freedom of Information request.
A district court in September upheld the request in a ruling covering scores of photographs and several videotapes. Government lawyers said it was considering an appeal, and the images were not immediately released.
In a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press, SBS said the ACLU had not seen the images sought under the Freedom of Information request, so it had not been able to confirm whether they were the same as those broadcast today.
But the general description of the photographs the ACLU is seeking "is consistent with the photographs we are releasing," the SBS statement said.
SBS refused to give details of the source of the photographs, and it was impossible to independently confirm their authenticity.
"Dateline is confident in the credibility of the source of these new photographs and videos," the SBS statement said. "They are entirely consistent with descriptions of the unreleased photographs and videos from various army reports into the abuses."
At a Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry in May 2004, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld testified that not all known photographs of the abuses at Abu Ghraib had been publicly released.
"Beyond abuse of prisoners, there are other photos that depict incidents of physical violence toward prisoners, acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman," Rumsfeld said.
Copyright 2006 Associated Press
http://www.ap.org
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0215-11.htm
http://www.thememoryhole.com/war/iraqis_tortured/ |
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Re: DI Editors: Two Week Suspension Pending Further Review |
by jus passsin thru
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
17 Feb 2006
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Notice that the fundamentalists on the other side didn't even offer two cents for the heads of Gorton and Prochaska.
That's GOT to take a College Republican down a notch or two in self-importance. |
