A great silent majority?

I was a guest on Bill O'Reilly's show again last night and as part of the broadcast, Fox News reported that the so-called Muhammad cartoons have now been published in seven commercial American newspapers and four college papers in the United States (presumably including The Badger Herald in the latter tally).

I can't vouch for the accuracy or lack thereof of either of those figures, though I will candidly say that the collegiate number strikes me as possibly being a touch low. Regardless, though, it would seem the single-digit assessments are at least in the right ballpark. And I continue to find this wildly disturbing.

As the New York Times notes in an article today:

Most major American newspapers, including The New York Times, have not published the cartoons, which were first published in a Danish newspaper last September.

But on college campuses, student journalists are still grappling with the decision, saying the choice of most of the nation's newspapers makes theirs even more crucial. Editors at some student publications at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University, Northern Illinois University and Illinois State University have published some of the cartoons.

...

"Universally, we found the cartoon to be repugnant," said Mac VerStandig, the editor in chief of The Badger Herald. "But we believe that there was a certain endangerment of free speech here, especially given the general prudishness of the American press. We believe our readers are mature enough to look at these images."

And I think the quote I gave the Times does neatly sum up my disgust on this front. The notion that we live in a country where the First Amendment is sacred and newspapers are supposedly dedicated to informing their readership, yet a major news organization's attempt at quantifying how many publications have done just that yields single digit results, should be reason for pause.

It is no secret at this point that the Herald has come under criticism for printing the image in our Monday paper. And there has been a conscious effort, in honor of the same free speech and open exchange of ideas, to publish as many letters to the editor this week as possible, given the stature of the controversy. But, as the editor who receives that flood of letters, one thing that has been a welcome relief to me is the number of people who have written in not to condemn the paper, ask for an apology or call for my resignation/termination, but rather to thank and/or congratulate us. This is a sizable and notable portion of the feedback, albeit probably still a minority (people are always more inclined to write in when they have a qualm).

And thus I am left wondering if this is not a decently representative sample. Surely there is nothing scientific about it – these are notes to the editor of a Madison newspaper sent voluntarily without solicitation. Still, it would seem that in a country of thousands of newspapers, this view might be roughly mirrored by thousands of papers running the cartoons.

Still, it has not.

Again, I don't know if the Fox News numbers are accurate. But if they are even remotely close to true, the complete paranoia that dominates a press apparently content with appeasement may be far greater than even I had imagined.