The Crucible of Censorship
When Fulton, Missouri school superintendent Dr. Mark Enderle recently decided to ban Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” which had been scheduled as Fulton High School’s spring play, he reminded me of the scared and dishonest executives at most major American media outlets (including NBC, CBS, NPR, CNN, USA Today, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press) and their collective decision to censor the controversial cartoon depictions of Mohammed.
Superintendent Enderle told the New York Times that “The Crucible” is “a fine play,” but he was nonetheless dropping it to keep the school from being “mired in controversy” all spring. “That was me in my worst Joe McCarthy moment, to some,” Dr. Enderle said.
You got that much right, Doc!
Dr. Enderle’s excuse was the small town culture war that erupted over the high school’s previous staging of the musical “Grease.” Despite script changes that eliminated profanity and any reference to something called “weed,” three people (all members of the same Christian congregation) wrote letters complaining about scenes in the play of drinking, smoking and kissing. One critic who hadn’t seen the show still criticized its “immoral behavior veiled behind the excuse of acting out a play.”
Canceling “The Crucible” was “entirely a preventative maintenance issue,” Dr. Enderle explained. “I can’t do anything about what’s already happened, but do I want to spend the spring saying, ‘Yeah, we crossed the line again’?”
To his credit, the superintendent admitted he was “not 100 percent comfortable” with his decision to censor. That’s a lot more than any of our major media gatekeepers are willing to admit. Instead, they are trumpeting their decisions not to show the cartoon images as if they find censorship something to be proud of. Check out their rationales:
- “¢ CNN “is not showing the negative caricatures of the likeness of the Prophet Mohammed” because the network “believes its role is to cover the events surrounding the publication of the cartoons while not unnecessarily adding fuel to the controversy itself.”
“¢ USA Today editors “concluded that we could cover the issue comprehensively without republishing the cartoon, something clearly offensive to many Muslims.” Deputy world editor Jim Michaels declared, “It’s not censorship, self or otherwise.”
“¢ New York Times editor Bill Keller said he and his staff concluded after “long and vigorous debate” that publishing the cartoons would be “perceived as a particularly deliberate insult” by Muslims. “Like any decision to withhold elements of a story, this was neither easy nor entirely satisfying, but it feels like the right thing to do,” Keller concluded.
“¢ CBS Evening News producer Rome Hartman said refusing to run the cartoons “should not be seen as somehow sanctioning or kowtowing to a violent minority” since the vast majority of Muslims would find the depictions of Mohammed inherently offensive. (So CBS is kowtowing to all Muslims, not just the violent minority?)
“¢ The Oregonian’s managing editor Therese Bottomly equated not running Muhammad cartoons with “avoiding the n-word”¦ We have every right and an ability to publish the cartoons. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.”
“¢ Boston Globe executives announced they had “exercised an uncomfortable but necessary restraint;” the Washington Post’s ombudsman declared valid the paper’s decision “that publishing these cartoons would violate our standards;” the Seattle Times cited its “responsibility to be sensitive to people;” the Orlando Sentinel determined that “newspapers serve their communities by exercising restraint;” and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s reader representative summed it all up by invoking the hoary “Running the cartoons now is like shouting “˜fire’ in a theater” argument.
And so on”¦literally ad nauseum, because as a practicing journalist those apologias make me sick. At least Boston Phoenix editors were honest enough to admit that they were terrorized and feared “retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do.” Noting that they “believe in the principles of free speech and a free press,” they declined to “place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy” — one of the few worthy explanations among those who refused to show the cartoons.
The cartoon flap is admittedly among the most controversial and divisive “˜culture war’ issues since”¦what? Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ”? The regular appearance in the Arab press of anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews with large hooked noses? Chris Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung? Kanye West in a crown of thorns on the cover of Rolling Stone? Dan Brown’s virulently anti-Catholic novel “The Da Vinci Code” — soon to be a major motion picture?
Clearly the Mohammed cartoons draw immediate and highly emotional responses across a wide political and cultural spectrum. One piece I recently posted elicited hundreds of comments, most of which alternated between excessive praise:
“I want to bow down to you. I want to fucking worship you. With all the whining and spinelessness over this Mohammed drawing issue, I can’t tell you how happy I am to see (you) come down on the side of free speech”
and equally excessive calumny:
“I found your liberal comments disgusting and outrageous”¦How dare you say that depicting a creed in such a racist manner is acceptable? You are a sick and twisted neo liberal who is heartless and has no decency”¦ YOU PHONEY FAKEY, OFFENSIVE LIBER-SHITHEAD!”
Perhaps this sort of passion from the masses frightens our news gatekeepers so much they feel the need to shelter themselves from their audience by sheltering their audience from the news. But once you begin down censorship’s slippery slope — feeble protests aside, let’s call it what it is –it’s difficult to keep from sliding ever further into an abyss.
Just look at what has happened back at Fulton High.
Both “Grease” and “The Crucible,” the second-most-frequently-performed musical and drama on school stages, are now verboten. Why? Jarryd Lapp, a junior who was a light technician on Fulton High’s production of “Grease,” has a theory on the cancellation of “The Crucible.” “The show itself is graphic,” he said. “People get hung; there’s death in it. It’s not appropriate.” And drama teacher Wendy DeVore believes the play was canceled because it portrays “a time in history that makes Christians look bad. In a Bible Belt community,” she added, “it makes people nervous.”
Where will it end? As the Times reported, teachers and students at Fulton High have already begun self-censoring, ruling out future productions of other plays, like “˜Little Shop of Horrors,’ the musical that features a cannibalistic plant. Other commonly performed high school plays are now equally deemed “potentially offensive:” “Bye Bye Birdie” shows smoking and drinking; “Oklahoma,” a scene of near-rape. “Diary of Anne Frank” has still more graphic scenes of death — even genocide — so let’s not go there”¦ As for Shakespeare? Even “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” as Superintendent Enderle noted, is “not a totally vanilla play.”
Nor are all the Mohammed cartoons totally inoffensive — although many are just plain silly. But, as Tim Rutten asked in a recent Los Angeles Times media column, “If the images first published in Jyllands-Posten last September are so inherently offensive that they cannot be viewed in any context, why did Danish Muslims distribute them across an Islamic world that seldom looks at Copenhagen newspapers?” And why was there no reaction when one of Egypt’s largest newspapers published these cartoons on its front page in October? “Apparently its editor isn’t as sensitive as his American colleagues.”
Meanwhile, as Rutten notes, the New York Times saw fit to illustrate an essay by the paper’s art critic with a reproduction of Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung. And CNN illustrated a story on those anti-Semitic caricatures in the Arab press by showing”¦ virulently anti-Semitic cartoons. Wolf Blitzer explained that while CNN had decided as a matter of policy not to broadcast any image of Muhammad, but telling the story of anti-Semitism in the Arab press required showing those caricatures!
“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,” Rutten concluded.
And executives at the American-Statesman newspaper (out of Austin, Texas) said all but one of the readers who respond on the paper’s website supported their decision to publish the cartoons. “It is one thing to respect other people’s faiths and religion, but it goes beyond where I would go to accept their taboos in the context of our freedoms and our society,” the paper’s editor, Rich Oppell, told Editor & Publisher.
The alternative is simply to surrender our ideals and our freedom. At Fulton High School, they apparently already have. According to the Times, students there have learned their lesson — there’s just no use fighting City Hall.
“It’s over,” said fifteen year old Emily Swenson. “We can’t do anything about it. We just have to obey.”
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