Charlie Hebdo Est Toujours Puant

Apparently there was an abortive attempt to make the Associated Press decision to not publish the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo cover on the "anniversary" of the mass slaughter at its office that spilled over into other places, into a cause célèbre.   As with its stupid, puerile cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, it has gone with a cover depicting "God" with a machine gun and blood on his sleeve with the caption "The assassin is always at large," my translation.  It's typical Charlie Hebdo, stupid, intentionally offensive in lieu of any cleverness, totally predictable and uninformative, the opposite of journalism.  It's typical of so much of the substitution of predictable humor geared to reliably get the agreement of its intended audience instead of telling them anything true or new or useful of informative.  It's a marketing strategy that has taken over pretty much of everything from American cabloid news, to newspapers, downward to the online webloids and even farther down to the common as dirt opinion blogs and into the intellectual and moral vacuity of the twitter-sphere.   Any part of that could disappear tomorrow and after the week of noticing its absence was over, it would be filled in by the same uniform product produced by some other equally stupid and pointless venue of sameness.

As I pointed out last year, the criticism of those who chose not to reproduce the cartoons of Muhammad that predictably and irresponsibly and pointlessly led to a violent reaction was as much of a violation of free press as the decision to ban publishing them would have been.  An editor choosing what not to publish is the very essence of free press.  The telling thing about that criticism is that it is an assertion that there's something wrong with being morally responsible, in not provoking a predictable and likely violent reaction, asserting that being grotesquely irresponsible is a moral duty, no matter how stupid, pointless, useless and intentionally offensive the thing not published is.  One of the most obvious things about the whole "draw Muhammad" shtick has been is that as long as it was brown and black people getting killed in Muslim majority countries in Asia, Africa and other places in the reaction, it was AOK with the white media of the West.

Last year media outlets were full of  "Je suis Charlie Hebdo", and considering how ubiquitous the sort of crap they publish, their irresponsibility their pointlessness, it's probably the most honest thing they said about it.

The only reason that anything the media does is important enough to take its protection seriously is when it seriously and responsibly tells the truth.  That was the only reason that the Bill of Rights should have created a special right for an artificial, corporate entity which has no natural rights, the only reason for anyone to consider those rights important to democracy and a decent society.  All the rest of it is nothing that any serious person needs to ever consider deserving any protection or support.  When it's as grotesquely irresponsible as Charlie Hebdo is, routinely, turning it into a cause is more pathology and far less courageous defense of freedom.