After the Charlie Hedbo terror attack in Paris, a number of publications showed the cover of the next issue with Mohammud saying "Tout est Pardonne" (all is forgiven). The NY Times published a story without the image. In any interview in Jan 2015,
“Out of respect to our readers we have avoided those we felt were
offensive,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet told The
Huffington Post on Monday night, shortly after the Charlie Hebdo cover
was released online. “Many Muslims consider publishing images of their prophet innately offensive and we have refrained from doing so,” Baquet said.
Yesterday, the NYTimes, in a blog post, had an article on a protest some over some 'art' which had an image of a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI made of condoms. The article had the portrait.
The blogpost indicates that the image of Benedict was meant to be negative, perhaps offensive,
Niki Johnson of Milwaukee, the artist who created the work, said in
an interview that she disagreed with Benedict’s conservative social
positions, including a statement that condoms could contribute to the
spread of AIDS in Africa. The portrait, she said, is “not hate-based,”
but rather a way to critique Benedict’s views while raising awareness
about public health.“What I want to do is really destigmatize the condom, normalize it,”
Ms. Johnson says.
A key issue here is whether the policy of the NY Times included blogs. If yes, they are hypocrites, if no, then not.
Interview with Huffington Post is here.
Blogpost with image of Benedict XVI is here.
Today, there was an interview given to the Washington Examiner. In the interview, the NY Times spokesman defended their blog and did not invoke the 'it was a blog' defense. The defense is someone incoherent but here is an interesting portion,
"...Hundreds of thousands of people protested
worldwide, for instance, after the Danish cartoons were published some
years ago. While some people might genuinely dislike this Milwaukee
work, there doesn't seem to be any comparable level of outrage...."
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that what the NYTimes means to say is something like, "Catholics don't kill you when they are insulted, muslims do" but the NYTimes obviously can't bring themselves to actually say that.
t
said,
The NY Times was enthusiastic about the Pope's recent encyclical which called for action on climate change. From their editorial on June 19, 2015
"...The timing of “Laudato Si” could not have been better. In December,
delegates from nearly 200 nations will gather in Paris to make one more
attempt at a global arrangement that would commit all nations to reduce
their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, before
atmospheric concentrations reach what some believe is the point beyond
which truly intolerable consequences are inescapable...."
Back a few years ago Obamacare was beginning to be litigated on religious grounds related to drugs that cause abortion and so forth. Then the NY Times was not so enthusiastic. From their editorial of May 27 2012,
"...Under the Constitution, churches and other religious organizations have
total freedom to preach that contraception is sinful and rail against
Mr. Obama for making it more readily available. But the First Amendment
is not a license for religious entities to impose their dogma on society
through the law. The vast majority of Americans do not agree with the
Roman Catholic Church’s anti-contraception stance, including most
American Catholic women...."
Interestingly, the 2015 encyclical also is against abortion and against gay marriage but the NY Times seems not to have noticed.
The two issues (abortion and climate change) are not the same and furthermore, it seems to me that abortion is more a legitimate religious issue than climate change. Anyway, it shows clearly that the NY Times is not above cherry picking pieces of doctrine they like and ignoring or dismissing as irrelevant doctrine that they dislike and, or course don't tell their readers about this in an honest and straightforward way.
Salon is an opinion website on the left of the political spectrum.
In the image are two tweets from Salon.com (slnm.us). One is from 2013 after the terror attack at the Boston marathon and says,
"Muslims don't need to apologize for the Tsarnaevs"
the other is from a few days ago and says
"White America must answer for the Charleston church massacre"
Whether we have hypocrisy or not seems to be a matter of whether Salon.com is a unitary body or whether the individuals (they are different individuals) who tweeted for Salon.com are considered outside of their Salon.com affiliation. Also the tweet from 2013 links to a summary of research which purports to back up the tweet. However, I am quite skeptical of research summarized by advocates, especially 'social science' research.
