It was in 2006. I had started writing a column for the alt-weekly New York Press. Another columnist wrote about the slow roiling controversy touched off by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s publication of several cartoons that mocked Islam and Muhammad the year before. The Press’s editors and its owners butted heads, harshly, over whether their paper should also publish the cartoons to illustrate the story.
The suits feared a boycott, protests, or worse. They said, go ahead and run the story but leave the pictures out. The editors argued such an omission would be a “hypocritical” cop-out, and walked out in protest. There went the editors. There went my column.
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