Charlie Hebdo And The Interview Controversy

The Interview was a satirical movie originally scheduled to be released by Sony Pictures on Christmas Day 2014. The subject matter of the movie was considered by some to be controversial. The plot of the film centered around a fictional plan to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. A month before the film was to be released, Sony was the victim of hackers who stole a large quantity of sensitive data from Sony’s hard drives and then published it on the Internet. Although they never took credit for the hack, it was suspected that the North Korean government was behind the breach. “The country eventually denied involvement, but heaped praise on the hack, calling it a ‘righteous deed’” (The Interview, 2014).

Things escalated further when

This attack by Muslim extremists resulted in the deaths of twelve people. This was not the first time that Charlie Hebdo’s office had been targeted; it was hit with a firebomb in 2011, also by religious extremists unhappy with content printed in the paper.

These situations, both The Interview controversy and the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices, raise the question of whether media outlets should be more sensitive to other countries and other ethnic groups when it creates and distributes content. While on the surface this may sound like something that movie makers and publishers should take into account, it really would be setting a dangerous precedent for a media outlet to restrict their content solely because they are afraid to offend

The press is seen as merely an outlet for the government’s propaganda. Middle Eastern extremist groups, as well as many of their governments, operate the same way. “The Middle Eastern press is tightly controlled by government restrictions through ownership and licensing, and it is not uncommon for opposition newspapers to suddenly disappear and for journalists to be jailed or forced to leave the country following political upheaval” (Biagi, 2017, p. 340). These are nations and cultures that don’t understand the concept of free speech. They have never had it, it has never been a part of their lives, and they view it as dangerous. They operate under conditions very similar to the Soviet theory of the media, with agents of the government able to exercise prior restraint to control what information is published. Problems arise when the repressive views of these groups meet the more free-thinking views of the rest of the world. In the case of the Charlie Hebdo attack, “in the space of a few minutes, the assault also crystallized the culture clash between religious extremism and the West’s devotion to free expressions” (Bilefsky,