A duty not to inflame the Muslim street

Wretchard writes,

What was that about limits proposed on free speech arising out of a duty not to inflame the Muslim street? Under what category of inflammation does attributing a pig-snouted depiction of Mohammed to the Jyllands-Posten cartoons fall, when that cartoon was never published by the newspaper, and as anyone from the BBC might have known by simply obtaining a copy of the cartoons?...

This is going to rank right up there with the fake Koran-flushing story which got people killed in Afghanistan. No one has a right to expect perfection from the media. Like intelligence agencies, which they resemble in some respects, the media sometimes gets things wrong. But I'd argue that some publications have a dangerous tendency to believe stories like "right-wing Danish publication portrays Mohammed as pig" because they want to believe it. This phenomenon is called bias and bias is dangerous not because it predisposes one to a wrong set of opinions but to the wrong set of facts.

Ironically, if the BBC had published the cartoons it would inevitably have discovered that the pig picture was not part of the Jyllands-Posten cartoon set. But instead of presenting the dry facts it substituted hearsay and for days the world was inflamed over a set of images described only at second-hand; wrongly described at that and imagining the worst about what were actually a very mild set of drawings. This violent debate occurred precisely because organizations like the BBC, whose job it was to present the facts, failed signally in their duty. Instead they went through the mummery of piously refusing the show the images "out of respect for Islam" when in fact they were actually, though perhaps unintentionally, contributing to the obscurantism surrounding the whole affair. That is the kindest interpretation I can put on the matter.

Here's the pig.