Free Speech

No one in the media, least of all Meejit, readily admits to purveying conventional wisdom. God forbid a columnist starts a screed by declaring that, if readers care to look beyond a few flashy flights of rhetoric and some trivial carping at big targets, and note instead the underlying assumptions, they'll find nothing substantial, new, different or challenging in what follows.

Nope, our job, in general, is to look like we're really courting brickbats and putting it up to someone-or-other. The Sunday Independent is Meejit's traditional target in this regard, with its pose as the lone finger-in-the-dyke against the flood of IRA-Islamo-fascism, when its posture toward real institutions of social, economic and political power is more accurately described as a conjunction of tongue and warmer orifices.

But people in glass houses and all that. The survival of Village is heartening in so many respects, but the fact that along the way it has lost some genuinely unconventional voices (Marie Mulholland, Brynn Craffey) and picked up some conventional wiseguys is disappointing, not least because it represents something of a "remasculation" in its (our) approach to current-affairs journalism.

Thus John Waters turns his fondness for traditional values (patriarchy, war, Fianna Fáil, that sort of thing) into a rebel yell, and at this point looks as silly as those liberals who have fancied themselves brave warriors for repeatedly putting the boot in to the corpse of Catholic Ireland. Matt Cooper, more conspicuously smart, bravely devotes a page of newsprint to championing poor Bono against strawmen begrudgers.

Both of these guys bring other things to the mix, are worthy of respect as journalists and are of course entitled to their conventional wisdom – someone's got to have it, or it wouldn't be conventional. But their views have scarcely been rescued in the nick of time from under the jackboot of censorious mainstream media.

The point being, among other things: "provocative" is the most overused marketing term in the media, and almost invariably refers to vague shadows of showy controversy rather than the substantial, argumentative underpinnings of the real thing. This is the context in which a newspaper's rightful duty to "provoke debate" can morph into a righteous mission for "provocation".

The Danish Mohammad cartoons were clearly, in intent and in effect, a racist provocation, a "let's show those intolerant Muslims" exercise, and, as such, a typically easy diversion from the more substantial job of challenging local forms of hegemony. (Some of them are also pretty funny.) Many of the people getting excited about free speech have failed to note that they were originally published many months ago, and the protests against them took the form of equally and absolutely defensible free speech, including letters, protests and boycott campaigns.

Meejit doesn't fling "racist" around lightly. Many Irish left-liberals ascribe it too easily to local conditions: eg the now-infamous Irish Times poll on work permits could indicate a popular sense that the labour market needs tighter oversight and regulation rather than widespread racism.

But it seems to me that the term "racist" applies unequivocally to a newspaper's deliberate, gratuitous decision to offend the deepest beliefs and sensibilities of millions of people it doesn't like. It is difficult to see a parallel for such a decision in other Western "blasphemy" controversies that related to Christianity or Judaism: Monty Python's Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ were provocative but not deliberate attacks on Christian faith. The decisions of other European newspapers, after months of controversy, to repeat the Danish offence simply underscores the widespread Islamic belief that Europe's elite despises Muslims. It's hardly surprising the protests escalated from there, beyond defensible limits.

That said, the newspapers' free-speech rights, even to the point of racist provocation, should be legally and morally unassailable. It is absurd, on the other hand, for them to expect that the exercise of those rights may not sometimes exact a price.