One managing editor's response to uproar following many media outlets' decisions to publish/broadcast images of Americans killed, burned, hung in Falluja

{courtesy of Laurie Cook, who obtained the published letter to readers from a friend whose father is Phil Lucas}

Headline: Up against fanaticism

By Phil Lucas
Executive Editor
The Panama City News Herald

If straight talk of savagery offends you, if you believe in ethnic and gender diversity but not diversity of thought or if you think there is an acceptable gray area between good and evil, then turn to the funny pages, and take the children, too.

This piece is not for you.

We published pictures Thursday of burnt American corpses hanging from an Iraqi bridge behind a mob of grinning Muslims.

Some readers didn’t like it.

Mothers said it frightened their children. A woman who works with Muslim physicians thought it might offend or endanger them.

Well, we sure don’t want to frighten, offend or endanger anybody, do we? That’s just too much diversity to handle. I mean, somebody might get hurt.

We could fill the newspaper every morning with mobs of fanatical Muslims. They can’t get along with their neighbors on much of the planet: France, Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, Spain, Morocco, India, Tunisia, Somalia, etc. etc. etc. Can anybody name three ongoing world conflicts in which Muslims are not involved? Today, where there is war, there are fanatical Muslims. We might quibble about who started what conflicts, but look at the sheer number of them.

One thing is sure. Muslim killers started the one we are in now when they slaughtered more than 3,000 people, including fellow Muslims, in New York City. Madeline Albright, the former secretary of state and feckless appeaser who helped get us into this mess, said last week Muslims still resented the Crusades. Well, Madame Albright, if Westerners were not such a forgiving people, we might resent them too.

Let’s recap the Crusades. Muslims invaded Europe and when they reached sufficient numbers they imposed their intolerant religion upon Westerners by force. Christian monarchs drove them back and took the battle to their homeland. The fight lasted a couple of centuries, and we bottled them up for 1,000 years.

Now, a millennium later, Muslims have expanded forth again. Ask France. Ask England. Ask Manhattan. Two-and-a-half years ago fanatical Muslims laid siege to us. We woke up to the obvious. Our president announced it would be a very long war, then took the battle to the Islamic homeland. Sound familiar?

Let’s consider the concept of a “long war.” Last time it was 200 years, give or take.

Anybody catch Lord of the Rings? You know, the good part, the part that wasn’t fiction, the part that drew us to the books and movies because it was the truest part: the titanic struggle between good and evil, between freedom and enslavement, between the individual and the state, between the celebration of life and the worshipping of death.

That’s the fight we are in, and it never ends. It just has peaks and valleys.

There may be a silent majority of peaceful Muslims – some live here – but that did not save 3,000 people in the World Trade Centers, the millions gassed and butchered in the Middle East, the tens of thousands slain in Eastern Europe and Asia, the hundreds blown to bits in the West Bank and Spain, or the four Americans shot, burned and hung like sausage over the Euphrates as a fanatical minority of Muslims did the joyful dance of death.

Maybe we are so tolerant, we are so bent on “diversity,” we are so nonjudgmental, we are so wrapped up in our six-packs and ballgames that our brains have drained to our bulbous behinds. Maybe we’re so addled on Ritalin we wouldn’t know which end of a gun to hold. Maybe we need a new drug advertised on TV every three minutes, one that would help us grow a backbone.

It doesn’t take a Darwin to figure out that in this world the smartest, the fastest, the strongest, and the most committed always win. No exceptions.

Look at your spouse and children. Look at yourself in the mirror. Then look at the pictures from the paper last Thursday. You better look at them. Those are the people out to kill you.

Who do you think will win? You? Or them? Think you can take your ball and go home and they will leave you alone? Read a little history. Start with last week, last month, last year, and every other year back for half a century. Then go back a thousand years. Nobody hides from this fight.

Like it or not, that’s the way it was and that’s the way it is. But many Americans don’t get it.

That’s why we published those pictures.

If they jarred you off the sofa, if they offended you, if they scared your children and sent you into a rage at mass murderers or heartless editors, then I say, it’s a start.

College Papers Pay for April Fools' Issues
From the Associated Press Wednesday, April 7

By DAN NEPHIN
PITTSBURGH - Being funny without being offensive is tough to do, which is why college newspapers that publish April Fools' Day editions often end up paying for it.

Three student publications that put out spoofs this year — those at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Scranton and the University of Nebraska at Omaha — know all too well.

Carnegie Mellon's paper, The Tartan, voluntarily shut down for the rest of the semester after publishing a racially charged cartoon in its 12-page spoof edition. The cartoonist lost his job, and the editor in chief — who blamed fatigue for clouding editors' judgment — is taking a leave of absence until fall.

University of Scranton officials closed The Aquinas for parodying Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," college administrators and Georgetown University, a fellow Jesuit institution.

The Gateway, the Nebraska paper, apologized for its four-page edition titled The Ghettoway. One story, with the headline "Gateway cameras stolen during weekend," was written by Ono Udidn. Another fake byline: Mindjo Bidness. The news editor, who is black, told The Gateway for a story Tuesday that she thought the content was representative of pop culture in general.

The NAACP, the Urban League and many community members filed complaints with Nebraska's chancellor. Nancy Belck told The Gateway: "I find it (The Ghettoway) offensive and we will not tolerate it on this campus."

About 75 readers protested Carnegie-Mellon's The Natrat — Tartan backward — which included a depiction of female genitalia and poems about rape and mutilation. The school is forming a committee to investigate.

"The horrible cartoon ... is a repudiation of our core values and it must not be tolerated," university President Jared L. Cohon wrote in a letter to the newspaper of the drawing, which shows a goat using a slur in describing how he hit a black person on a bicycle.

Besides apologizing, The Gateway is planning sensitivity training for its staff members and a forum on student relations. The Tartan has decided to hire an ethics manager to review future issues.

Many of the student publications that find themselves in hot water over spoof editions don't have a professional adviser on staff, said Mark Goodman, executive director Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va.

The law center discourages April Fool's editions, which Goodman said have been known to lead to lawsuits. Still, he said, the organization defends the rights of student editors to decide what to print.

"The suits are seldom successful, but the problem is, they can really cause a lot of headaches" in terms of cost and effort to fight, he said.

April Fools' issues are much less common than they were in the 1970s and '80s, Goodman said.

Gruesome Iraq Images Could Shake U.S. Opinion

Related to our class discussion about the Richard Drew photo, horrific photos of two burned American civilians brutally killed and displayed in Fallluja, Iraq, are getting quite a bit of attention. The NY Times had one of the most disturbing photos I will ever see on its front page today. We will discuss.

From Reuters:
By Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Graphic images of Americans being mutilated in Iraq (news - web sites) could powerfully shake U.S. public support for the occupation and may play into the presidential campaign, pollsters and media analysts said on Thursday.

After initially hesitating, U.S. TV networks began showing the images of cheering Iraqis in Falluja celebrating the murders of four American security contractors whose bodies were burned, mutilated and strung up for public view.

Newspapers carried front-page pictures showing charred bodies surrounded by exulting mobs.

"These pictures speak volumes. It's just what the Bush administration did not want. Americans are seen here as real victims, not just statistics," said pollster John Zogby.

The images immediately evoked comparisons to the 1993 killings of 18 U.S. troops in Mogadishu, when crowds were filmed dragging the corpses of U.S. soldiers through the streets. Washington ended its military presence in Somalia soon afterwards.

"The media is linking the Falluja incident to Mogadishu and those images are already imprinted on our collective visual memory. Images are always processed through the previous knowledge that we have," said Cara Finnegan, a communications professor at the University of Illinois.

In the case of Mogadishu, the power and freshness of those memories were vastly reinforced when the incident became the basis for a 2002 Hollywood movie, "Black Hawk Down."

State Department spokesman Adam Ereli rejected the parallel with Mogadishu. "The Mogadishu precedent was that following attacks, we left. And that's not going to happen here, I can tell you right now," he said.

The Bush administration has said it will not be deflected from its determination to stabilize the country and hand sovereignty back to Iraqis at the end of June.

Temple University communications professor Andrew Mendelson said it was much too soon to say how U.S. opinion would react, although Americans would certainly be shocked and angry.

"Images like this, especially of dead Americans, resonate very deeply," he said.

The Falluja images spread quickly on the Internet on Wednesday. Even as some U.S. networks tried to tone them down, they were available in full and graphic detail on some Web Internet sites.