Nets Shy Away From Mohammed Cartoons

The controversial Mohammed cartoons have only appeared sporadically on television in recent days.

On ABC, Thursday’s Nightline showed a cartoon in its entirety. Fox News Sunday also showed one of them. But most other networks shied away.”On Friday CNN ran a disguised version of a cartoon, and on an NBC News program on Thursday, the camera shot depicted only a fragment of the full cartoon. CBS banned the broadcast of the cartoons across the network,” Dick Prince says.

Tuesday night on FNC, Michelle Malkin tried to “break the taboo.” She blogs: “I appeared tonight on Fox News Channel’s Hannity and Colmes for an all-too-brief segment on the Mohammed Cartoons. Before I drove to the Washington, D.C., studio, I stopped by a Kinko’s store, printed out the cartoons, and pasted them onto a piece of poster board. I then used my short time on the airwaves to do what no one wants to do on American TV” — but when she held up the poster and “tried to walk through the content of the cartoons, the camera cut from my display to video of the Islamists’ crazed, violent protests. As if we hadn’t seen enough of that already.””

Then on CNN’s American Morning today, “you could almost see the beads of sweat on the director and producers as the Danish editor raised some cartoons” during an interview, an e-mailer says. “First he showed a drawing showing the star of david. Then he said the same cartoonist ‘drew this’ — the picture was quickly switched to a scared Zain Verjee. CNN is so afraid that it is even censoring its own guests.”

> Update: 2:44pm: ABC News ran an image of a cartoon on various broadcasts last week but stopped in follow-ups, yesterday’s USAT says. “We understand the sensitivity of this issue, particularly among our Muslim viewers,” ABC News spokeswoman Cath[ie] Levine said. “We feel we can report this story now without needing to continually show the offending image.”

> Update: 2:50pm: “Don’t forget Special Report w/ Brit Hume in your list of shows/nets that have run those Mohammad cartoons. They did the story in the political grapevine segment several times since the photos were published in September, and used the cover of that Danish paper. And the show ran several of the controversial cartoons in a package and during panel discussions on Thursday and on Monday — no goofy pixelation or blurring like CNN.”