Everybody is talking about this week's issue of Charlie Hebdo. And no one is showing it. I'm trying to think of something that has been as talked in the media without being shown in the media. The only other things I can think of are celebrity sex tapes. Even they usually show a few brief clips. No one is daring to even show part of the Mohammed cartoon on the cover.
On the one hand, I can't blame them. During the Danish Cartoon Controversy, a lot of smaller or more ideologically-motivated publications published the cartoons as a matter of principle. I didn't really agree with that: I don't think you need to help spread people's message in order to defend their right to speak.
To put it another way: they say the test of your commitment to free speech is defending the right to speak even for a speaker you disagree with or are offended by. Thus, it's entirely possible that you would want to support a person's right to speak while not wanting to help them speak (or listen to them.) From that perspective, I would think it was appropriate not to reproduce the cartoons, since many publications would support the right to publish them while not supporting the sentiments expressed in them.
In this case, it just seems strange. People are talking about this magazine that is mysteriously absent from the reports about it. It got really weird when one reporter held up some of the inside pages for the camera, even though they were careful not to allow even a glimpse of the cover. So the usual images you would expect from a story about a magazine (like showing it on a newsstand) are suspiciously absent. At this point it's getting pretty silly: we're worried the extremists are going to go after every news outlet in the world for catching view, in the background, of a cartoon drawing of Mohammed.
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