Satire, terrorism and self-censorship

Don Asmussen's 2005 "Bad Reporter" comic, in the altered version that went to press.

Like so many people around the world, I was saddened, outraged and disgusted by the deadly terrorist attack on the office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. I feel so sad for all the wounded and for the people who died that horrible way. I want to express my heartfelt sympathy with the friends and loved ones of those who were killed. And I feel outraged that some bastards killed them because of satire.

We've been through this kind of thing before. Hell, Charlie Hebdo had been through it before. Its office was bombed several years ago.

And when I say we've been through this before, I'm not just talking about Islamist terrorists and cartoons. Just a few weeks ago, you'll remember, Sony Pictures nearly cancelled the release of the comedy movie "The Interview" because hackers infiltrated the company's computers and threatened to commit terrorist attacks, supposedly in retaliation for the movie's mockery of North Korean leader. (There is some debate over who was really responsible.) A few months before that, media critic Anita Sarkeesian had to cancel a scheduled speaking engagement because video game enthusiasts threatened to stage a mass killing in retaliation for her speaking out about sexism in video games.

One thing these incidents have in common is people using violence or the threat of violence to prevent people from saying things they disagree with in media that most people would think are not worthy of being taken seriously: cartoons, slapstick comedy movies, video game criticism. Maybe we don't think they're worthy of being taken seriously, but their opponents certainly do. And once these opponents have silenced their primary targets, they intimidate other media into silencing themselves. That is self-censorship.

If you're reading this, you've probably already read about the massacre, and you've probably read lots of think pieces on what it all means by people who are much smarter than me,  but I have a personal story to tell about self-censorship, cartoons and the threat of violence, and I want to share it.



The following is adapted from "21st Century Blasphemy: Religion and Censorship in the Courts Today," a paper I wrote for Prof. Raleigh Levine's Media Law class at William Mitchell College of Law in 2010:

In the summer of 2005, I was called upon to proofread a cartoon that I was afraid was going to get someone killed. I was working as a copy editor on the arts and entertainment desk at the San Francisco Chronicle. We were minutes away from our deadline and the brilliant in-house cartoonist Don Asmussen had just turned in his latest edition of "Bad Reporter," a strip that satirizes current events through the use of fake newspaper headlines. The strip that came across my desk that day played off a story in Newsweek magazine that week about guards at Guantanamo Bay who had reportedly flushed a Koran down a toilet in an effort to intimidate Muslim detainees. The story had sparked riots in parts of the Muslim world, riots in which people had been killed. In Asmussen's strip, a headline read, "Newsweek: 6-inch Koran Flushed Down Toilet, Grows to Over 24-Feet-Long [sic] in Sewers," accompanied by an image of a Koran that had turned into an alligator.

My job was to simply read the strip and check the spelling. But I saw the strip, thought of the riots, and thought I had to talk to a senior editor before I signed my "OK." I walked upstairs, where I ran into Editor Phil Bronstein in the hall. I showed him the strip and expressed my concern. He asked me what I thought we should do.  

This surprised me. I hadn't really thought that far. When I was proofreading the cartoon, I thought that if the cartoon ran as it was, we would, at the least, get some angry phone calls. The higher-ups would hear about these calls and they'd want to know why I didn't ask them about running it first. But when Phil asked me what we should do, I thought, someone really could get killed over this. I thought of my wife, who was then pregnant with our first child. I hemmed and hawed for a moment before I said, "I think we should change it or not run the strip." 

Together, we walked to Don Asmussen's cubicle and talked to him about it. Phil did not tell Don to change the strip. Instead, he just asked him if the joke was good enough that it was worth having someone try to kill one of us on our way to work. "I don't think the joke is worth it," Phil said. In the end, Don changed the Koran to a Bible and the strip ran. We substituted one holy book for another. I'm sure the irony in this was lost on none of us. And frankly, the strip we ran was less funny than Don's original version was.

Almost a decade later, I'm still troubled by my actions that day. I still think I needed an OK from a senior editor before running the strip, and I'm still not sure the joke was worth getting killed over. (As the cartoonist Ted Rall wrote this week in response to the Charlie Hebdo attack, political cartooning is so important it's "almost enough to die for.") But I'm bothered by the fact that when Phil asked me what we should do, I chose self-censorship.

         

In the years since this incident, untold journalists have had to make a similar choice, opting, as I did, for self-censorship. The risk of the alternative has been all too clear.

The Danish cartoons, "South Park" and Molly Norris

In 2006, much of the Muslim world was enraged by cartoons that ran in a Danish newspaper. The cartoons inspired firebomb attacks on the embassies of Western countries. One of the cartoonists, 75-year-old Kurt Westergaard, who depicted the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, has spent much of the time since the publication in hiding, and was attacked by an axe-wielding extremist on New Year's Day 2010.[i] In April 2010, the cable television station Comedy Central refused to air an episode of the animated series "South Park" that depicted Muhammad, after the station received death threats.[ii] In protest of Comedy Central's move, Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris drew a cartoon proposing an event to be titled "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day." Afterward, Norris received threats that were so serious that, on the advice of the FBI, she stopped cartooning and went into hiding.[iii] In October 2010, several newspapers refused to run a "Non Sequitur" comic strip that satirized the prohibition of the depiction of Muhammad, even though the strip itself didn't actually depict Muhammad.[iv]  The incidents of self-censorship and religious outrage go on and on.  

In the United States, the First Amendment protects us from government censorship, but it doesn't have much to say about censorship from private entities, or about self-censorship. And that's where all the silencing really happens.

UPDATE: I want to add something from Don Asmussen about the incident. In writing this paper for my law school class, I contacted him and asked him about the incident. I asked him if that experience, or ones like it, had made him think twice or censor himself before criticizing religions in the years since 2005. He said,

"Well, only Islam. I have made millions of jokes about Christians, Christian Scientists, Buddhists, Mormons, etc., since I can't stand any religions. But I knew that Islam was off limits because there was a general feeling that one's office would be bombed in reaction. So I can make fun of any religion except Islam. … [This gives the San Francisco Archdiocese], who complained I only picked on certain religions, a legitimate criticism of my work."

---

[i] See John F. Burns, Cartoonist in Denmark Calls Attack ‘Really Close,’ The New York Times, Jan. 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/world/europe/03denmark.html (last visited Oct. 18, 2010).

[ii] See Comedy Central censors South Park Mohammed episode, The Telegraph, April 22, 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/7620854/Comedy-Central-censors-South-Park-Mohammed-episode.html (last visited Oct. 18, 2010).

[iii] See Mark D. Fefer, On the Advice of the FBI, Cartoonist Molly Norris Disappears From View, Seattle Weekly, September 15, 2010. http://www.seattleweekly.com/2010-09-15/news/on-the-advice-of-the-fbi-cartoonist-molly-norris-disappears-from-view/ (last visited October 18, 2010).

[iv]  See Andrew Alexander, Where was the 'Where's Muhammad?' cartoon? Washington Post, October 10, 2010. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/08/AR2010100804947.html (last visited November 11, 2010). (The cartoon showed the cover of an imaginary book titled "Where’s Muhammad?" – a play on the "Where’s Waldo?" books.  It did not actually depict Muhammad.  The Washington Post editor responsible told the paper’s ombudsman that he withheld the strip because "it seemed a deliberate provocation without a clear message.")