Wednesday, February 15, 2006
NOBODY PUSHES THE SMH AROUND
America doesn’t want you to see these photographs, but that won’t stop the Sydney Morning Herald! They’ll never surrender to censorship demands from foreign regimes. This is a free land, and the SMH aims to keep it so; if that means upsetting a few Americans by publishing images they’d prefer not be published, well, mister, that’s exactly what the SMH will do.
Sure, they could have taken the easy way out and simply described the images, but that isn’t the SMH way. Nor will the television network SBS buckle before any bullying and threats. As executive producer Mike Carey says, people need to see these pictures so they can understand what happened.
Damn straight. Here’s to SBS and SMH, and I hope not too many of their staff are killed in the rioting.
UPDATE. Posted on February 4: “They won’t publish cartoons, but they will run anything they can get out of Abu Ghraib. Both sets of images provoke Islamic anger; note how the media behaves when that anger is directed at them.”