AIDemocracy.org: How are the Changes in Media Affecting Media Freedom?

“...Another important idea connected to a more accessible medium of news has been mentioned by Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who made the decision to publish cartoons depicting Muhammed in 2005, igniting a global debate that left protesters around the world dead. Publishing the cartoons has led to threats from Muslim governments, a fatwa issued against Rose, and repeated terrorist attempts against the paper itself. In a recent interview, he said the most important thing he had learned from the ten-year debate on the cartoons was that in this age of widely accessible Internet, contexts are lost.[
Without making a judgment on his actions in 2005, he brings up a critical point about the broader audience that can now be reached by local publications. Rose had allowed the cartoons to be published through his Danish magazine and for the Danish debate on free speech. The cartoons were interpreted differently in every country they reached, because they arrived solely as pictures, without the environment in which they were originally published. Many were unaware that in addition to mocking Islam, Charlie Hebdo cartoons mocked Catholicism, the French government, and Judaism. Cross-cultural media have stifled the debate on the limits of “free speech.”
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