Sometimes the media needs to learn to choose their battles wisely.
I am the first to stand up against any type of censorship. However, one of my favorite sayings is “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” This is exactly what I thought when I saw a racist editorial cartoon that recently ran in the New York Post. The editorial compared President Barack Obama to a chimpanzee. Read CNN’s commentary about it here.
In the cartoon, which ran Feb. 18, a police officer has shot a chimpanzee. The caption reads: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
Now, I’m all for attacking the president and his policies. In fact, watching the government is a critical role of the press. I even agree that, of all people, the president is the most open to public scrutiny. I just think someone should have given this one a bit more consideration.
Yes, it’s the Post’s right to run the cartoon. Yes, I understand the old saying “even a monkey could do it.” Yes, I agree that this would not be an issue if Obama weren’t black, but he is!
Let’s save the battles for when it’s really important. I would much rather have a public debate about a news photo that some readers thought pushed too far than an editorial cartoon that people think is racist. It just doesn’t seem worth it to me to offend an entire ethnic group for the sake of a cartoon.
There were a million different ways to depict presidential incompetence and/or disagreement with the stimulus bill. I don’t think this was a good one.
skins96 says
Along the same lines…
You know, there’s been some back and forth on the NICAR listserv over the years about the posting of concealed carry license databases. It just came up again recently when another newspaper posted their state’s data and there was the standard public outrage.
As one of my former colleagues at the Sun-Sentinel pointed out, the Legislature will probably move quickly to make the information private. “I hope it was worth the web traffic,” he said (paraphrasing).
That data was probably much more valuable as an in-house backgrounding tool than throwing it up for people to search to get some cheap Web traffic. Now, because someone wanted a few extra clicks, their journalism could suffer by not having it at all.
I generally think you should follow a “does this serve the public good?” policy. I just don’t see how throwing up a searchable database of people in the state with concealed carry licenses with no accompanying story, no context, no nothing fails to serve the public good.
thekrg says
I agree, Ryan. It becomes a real ethical debate. On one hand, we want all of the information to be public. On the other hand, when people misuse public information, everyone suffers… democracy suffers. We had a case awhile back here where an Oklahoma County court official was uploading scanned versions of public records. Great, right? Probably was, they included people’s social security numbers (which really wasn’t in the public’s best interest). And, of course, several people had their identities compromised. The court’s argument? We can’t use already scarce resources to black out people’s socials, so we should just take them down. Really? You could black out the social in less time than it takes you to gripe about doing it during a coffee break!
Ryan Mcneill says
I remember that case. And it was a major mistake. Research has shown that identity theft really doesn’t happen through public records. There’s an important AG opinion from Washington where he smacks down a city’s argument that providing DOBs makes employees ripe for id theft, saying the id theft from public records argument is lame.
Legislatures have a stupidity stampede anytime someone mentions ID theft.