UPDATE: The debate in Oslo yesterday turned out not to be very much about blogging vs. journalism at all – ref. the title “Cowardly editors or irresponsible bloggers?” – but about how mostly editors and journalists have handled the Muhammed cartoons controversy (arguably a more important topic than blogging, you might say…). Accompanying the debate was the result of an email survey among Oslo journalists (769 of 2600 responded). Here 70 percent said they wouldn’t have published the cartoons. Among different reasons given for not publishing, one wrote: “I want to live”.
Instead of a meticulous report from the meeting, a quote from a new Kenan Malik article in Index on Censorship:
In the real world, where societies are plural, then it is both inevitable and important that people offend the sensibilities of others. Inevitable because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable and we should deal with those clashes rather than suppress them. Important because any kind of social change or social progress means offending some deeply held sensibilities. ‘If liberty means anything,’l George Orwell once wrote, ‘it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’l Not to give offence would mean not to pursue change. Imagine what Galileo, Voltaire, Paine or Mill would have made of Ian Jack’ls argument that one should not depict things that may cause offence. Imagine he’ld lived 700 years ago and had said, ‘In principle it’ls right to depict the earth orbiting the sun, but imagine the immeasurable insult that the exercise of such a right would cause…’l
There just might be a consensus emerging that the cartoon controversy shows that confrontation sometimes is very productive. Certainly the result is a much more diverse debate about integration and religion.
