The libertarian bias in the media

The Mohammed cartoons and reaction to them in the west threatens to bust up the Christian fundamentalist-Libertarian coalition that has won the right wing over the last two generations

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Unfortunate timing saw prominent British columnist Daniel Wolf’s defence of press censorship in the prestigious British Spectator magazine in the same week the infamous Mohammed cartoons, published by a Danish newspaper in an apparently defiant act against censorship, sent Muslims around the world into the streets in widespread and sometimes violent protests.

While most media coverage in Canada was comprised of the usual and predictable thoughtless expressions of horror that anyone might get upset about anything, even much of the thoughtful media coverage of this surprising event has focused on the confusing world of Muslims and their multifaceted relationship to a complex and evolving Islam. More interesting and fruitful would have been a closer look at the even more confusing world of the media in the West and its complex and evolving interpretations of the term “freedom of speech.”

The initial controversy that led the Danish newspaper to commission and then print cartoons it intended to be insulting and offensive to Muslims arose out of a strictly western cultural war taking place within a recent breach between two right-wing forces: traditional libertarianism and religious (in this case, Christian) fanaticism.

These two virulent strains of right-wing thought came together in an uneasy and strictly convenient coalition two generations ago in response to the successes of the European and Canadian social-democratic model. In Europe, the religious fanatic wing of the coalition took shape inside nascent nationalist movements, while in America and to a lesser extent in Canada, usually slumbering theocratic leanings were nurtured to the same end. At the same time, a new intellectual strain of libertarianism grew out of heavy-handed state suppressions on both sides of the Atlantic, a libertarianism equally uncomfortable inside state-oriented left-wing approaches to freedom as inside church-oriented right-wing approaches. The so-called “liberal” bias that right-wing spokespeople complain about in the media mystifies liberals and their left-wing cadres for good reason: the media has largely been taken over not by liberals but by these libertarians.

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