Excerpt:
The British Daily Mail recently posted a story about the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo's new comic book life of Muhammad; they illustrated the story with a photo of a man standing in front of the Charlie Hebdo offices after Islamic jihadists had firebombed them. The man is holding one of the earlier issues of the paper that featured cartoons of Muhammad, but the Daily Mail pixelated out the image of Muhammad that was on the front cover of the paper the man was holding.
This is the suicide of the free press. The Daily Mail is generally better than the other papers in Britain in covering the jihad threat, but it is also careless, sensationalistic, and — as this proves — execrably cowardly. The Daily Mail is hereby signaling that violent intimidation works, and that all you have to do to get the West's vaunted "free press" to cower before you and give up its freedom is lob a few bombs, kill a few innocents, and make a few threats.
The Daily Mail editors would probably protest that they simply did not want to give needless offense to Muslim readers, and certainly a case can be made for avoiding giving needless offense to anyone's religious sensibilities. But there is no way this argument can be sustained in light of the obvious fact that no one in the mainstream media is concerned about hurting the delicate sensibilities of Christians or Jews by publishing images insulting to those religions; indeed, such images are likely to get National Endowment for the Arts awards and praise from the New York Times.