Tim Rutten is the “media critic” for the Los Angeles Times. I frequently disagree with his printed views. This morning, though, he takes the hypocritical American media to the woodshed for its self-censorship over the Danish cartoons, asking whether these same media outlets will self-censor over, say, the upcoming release of The Da Vinci Code, starring Tom Hanks in a vicious smear of the Catholic Church:
Naaaaaww
It won’t happen for a simple reason that has nothing to do with the ideas being expressed or anybody’s sensitivities, religious or otherwise. It won’t happen because Pope Benedict XVI isn’t about to issue a fatwa against director Ron Howard or star Tom Hanks. It won’t happen because Cardinal Roger M. Mahoney isn’t going to lead an angry mob to burn Sony Studios, and none of the priests of the archdiocese is going to climb into the pulpit Sunday and call for the producer’s beheading.
On the other hand, perhaps the events of the last two weeks have shocked our editors and news executives into a communal change of heart when it comes to sensitivies of all religious believers.
Right.
That will happen when pigs soar through the skies on the wings of angels, when the lion reclines with the lamb on high-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets and no one bothers to beat the world’s very last sword into a ploughshare because all the hungry have been fed.
Until that glorious day, those of us who inhabit this real world will continue to believe that the American news media’s current exercise in mass self-censorship has nothing to do with either sensitivity or restraint and everything to do with timidity and expediency.
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