Our self-appointed judges

• Google recently unveiled a system that enables citizens of the European Union to ask the search engine to remove results from its listings. The move comes in response to a landmark European Union court ruling that granted Europeans the "right to be forgotten." In the New York Times, columnist Joe Nocera suggested one possible candidate for removal: a repulsive photograph of a dead American tourist lying in a Cambodian hospital morgue, “his belly bloated, with a cotton swab in one of his nostrils.” (Click here.)
• Under what was described as “unimaginable pressure” from Jewish groups, the Metropolitan Opera announced last week that it was canceling plans to simulcast The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams’s widely acclaimed opera about the 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists and their killing of a disabled Jewish-American passenger. The Anti-Defamation League had objected that broad dissemination of Klinghoffer — which sought to give voice to Palestinians as well as Israelis, and to hijackers as well as victims — might stir up anti-Semitism or anti-Israel sentiment. Canceling the simulcast, said ADL national director Abraham Foxman, “does ensure that the opera will have far less of an impact beyond the walls of the opera house at Lincoln Center.”

Both of these items concern attempts to suppress or limit communication that some self-appointed judge thinks will cause harm if too many people are exposed to it. The Death of Klinghoffer may be a humanistic masterpiece (as many critics contend) or an apologia for terrorism (as Klinghoffer’s daughters contend), or both. But one thing is certain: Absent a simulcast transmission, you and I won’t be able to judge for ourselves unless we travel to Lincoln Center and spend upwards of $100 a ticket.

Listening to lobbyists

“We compromised,” Foxman told reporters of his negotiations with Met general manager Peter Gelb. That is, Gelb agreed to cancel the movie transmission but not the live performances.

Let us stipulate here that Foxman’s heart is in the right place. He has spent decades combating what he perceives as hateful free speech. Still, the question must be asked: By what logic does Foxman presume to make programming decisions for the Metropolitan Opera — especially about an opera he admits he hasn’t seen himself? And by what logic does a private artistic organization like the Met listen to such a lobbyist, however noble his motives?

Wrong question

Like the Met, Google has taken its first timid steps toward allowing individuals or groups to control what’s disseminated about them over the Internet. In his June 14 Times column about the unfortunate tourist in Cambodia, Joe Nocera responded positively. “What real harm would be caused,” Nocera asked rhetorically, by Google’s delinking a photograph “that had zero value to anyone, was not in any way newsworthy, but inflicted a great deal of pain?” But that is the wrong question. We should be asking: Who will decide what is valuable, newsworthy, or painful?

Prior to the Internet, newspapers often played God on such matters. Especially in small towns, many editors routinely suppressed legitimate news that might hurt someone’s feelings. The victims of these suppressions were readers who relied on these papers for local information.

Incest case

I write as the former editor of an Indiana daily newspaper that regularly published a full record of local court cases, thus sparing our readers the need to travel to the courthouse and examine the record for themselves. Consequently, I was often approached by people beseeching me to remove their cases from the paper. One was a minister who feared his moral authority would suffer if his congregation knew he’d been ticketed for speeding. When I refused to remove his offense from the record, he asked, “Who’s going to know?”

“You’ll know,” I replied, “and every time you read the court record, you’ll wonder what else I’ve deleted.” (In retrospect, given his profession, I should have added: “And God will know.”)

Another supplicant was a woman whose husband had been charged with committing incest with her teenage daughter. The woman contended, not unreasonably, that incest was a psychological issue, not a legal matter; public exposure, she said, could wreck her husband’s delicate therapeutic process. But when I asked her who had filed the criminal charge, she sheepishly admitted that she had.

Today, anyone with a computer enjoys access to everything on the Internet — valuable or worthless, newsworthy or painful. It’s a mixed blessing, of course. But when I log on to Google, I’d like to know that I’m accessing the full extent of the Internet — not what some gatekeeper, however benevolent, thinks I should see. And wouldn’t it be nice, when you attend the Met, to know that the programming decisions are being made by the Met’s general manager rather than Abraham Foxman?

To read a related commentary by Robrt Zaller, click here.