The Media's Role in a Clash of Misconceptions: The Case of the Danish Muhammad Cartoons

The Danish cartoon furor of early 2006 was only the most recent episode cited as evidence of a “clash of civilizations.” Although the subject was extensively reported by the global media, the media's framing of the debate as being between free speech and religious sensitivities was inherently flawed and contributed to further confusion rather than clarification. Moreover, the framework established and perpetuated by the media, that of a debate between freedom of speech and religious sensitivities, obscured the root cause of this conflict: the fact that both the Muslim world and the Western world suffer from gross misconceptions of the other. Although the misconceptions held by the Muslim world are phenomena that are, in relative terms, both more recent and more easily resolved, their counterparts in the Western world have been deeply embedded in the consciousness of Western society for more than a thousand years.This study examines the role of centuries of European media self-censorship on the subject of Muhammad in the most recent episode in this ongoing clash of misconceptions.