The "right" to respond

The Muslim law students who've launched human-rights complaints against Maclean's tell their side of the story in today's National Post. Basically, they say their human rights are being violated because Maclean's - which printed several pages of letters in response to Mark Steyn's controversial article - won't publish their response:

What should we do when a Canadian magazine publishes an article alleging that many Muslims are "hot for jihad," and that they share the same basic goals of terrorists? True to Canada's tradition of free speech, we decided to engage Mr. Steyn in a debate about his views.

We decided to follow the example of the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), a small but strident group of self-described "liberal secular Muslims," which has come to the defence of Maclean's. In its most recent media release, the MCC advised: "Mark Steyn's article was definitely alarmist, but the answer to his challenge is to write a counter piece and demand that Maclean's publish it."

Unfortunately, the MCC's advice came about nine months too late. On March 30, 2007, we met with Maclean's senior editors and proposed that they publish a response from a mutually acceptable source. The response was negative, which resulted in our human rights complaints.

[...]

What we did ask for, however, was an opportunity for the Muslim community to participate in the "free marketplace" of ideas. It is our belief that in its truest form, freedom of expression results in a lively debate among all interested parties -- not just among those who play by their own exclusionary rules. If Maclean's wants to publish articles alleging that many Muslims are "hot for jihad," it has to provide an opportunity to respond.

This issue isn't about attacking journalists or stifling free expression. It's about ensuring that our media outlets provide a forum for open debate and argument. ...

In the United States, there's a big debate over whether the "fairness doctrine" should be reintroduced for boradcast media. Here in Canada, these guys are demanding a "fairness doctrine" for print media, which would actually be pretty funny if the Canadian Islamic Congress newsletter was obligated to run articles by Mark Steyn.

Maclean's editor Kenneth Whyte, incidentially, says the students' demands were just a little greater than they're letting on:

On Dec. 5, Whyte issued the following statement to clarify what happened at the meeting: "The student lawyers in question came to us five months after the story ran. They asked for an opportunity to respond. We said that we had already run many responses to the article in our letters section, but that we would consider a reasonable request. They wanted a five-page article, written by an author of their choice, to run without any editing by us, except for spelling and grammar. They also wanted to place their response on the cover and to art direct it themselves.

"We told them we didn't consider that a reasonable request for response. When they insisted, I told them I would rather go bankrupt than let somebody from outside of our operations dictate the content of the magazine. I still feel that way."

Damian P.

Posted by damian at December 20, 2007 09:05 PM