I have to admit I was nervous Wednesday night after taping Jesse Brown’s Canadaland podcast, a show devoted to media criticism in Canada. I was afraid that I had gone too far, cursed too often and too furiously.

I was nervous I had been too harsh on Canadian media organizations for their treatment of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Online, they seemed to dance around whether or not to publish some of the satirical magazine’s more incendiary covers. Perhaps I should have waited to see the morning editions before I jumped down anyone’s throats for being cowardly.

But I opened the papers on Thursday to a profound sense of disappointment. It turns out I had not gone nearly far enough. I should have couched my terms a lot less. I should have said the word “chickenshit” a lot more, and without caveats.

With the thankful exception of the National Post, Thursday’s English newspapers and the CBC were uniformly chicken. None I saw published any of the incendiary front-page covers from Charlie Hebdo that were essential to understanding what that organization was about, and why 12 people were murdered in Paris on Wednesday.

The justification for this can, I think, be summed up by the CBC’s David Studer, who sent staff several emails explaining its rationale. “We aren’t showing cartoons making fun of the Prophet Mohammed,” he wrote. “Other elements of Charle Hebro’s (sic) content and style are fine, but this area should be avoided as, quite simply, it’s offensive to Muslims as a group.”

Let’s pretend for a moment that this isn’t nonsense -— it is, and I’ll get to that —- but let’s take the comment at face value for now.

Ignore the obvious point that Mr. Studer’s proclamation is totally inconsistent with past practices: the CBC, and every other media outlet, routinely runs content that is “offensive” to people who can be identified as “a group”: Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Scientologists, Conservatives, Communists, etc.

The problem is that “offensiveness” is not the standard by which we judge newsworthiness. There is certainly an argument to be made against running content that is offensive for its own sake, but if an idea or a story is in the greater public interest, matters of “offensiveness” are routinely and quickly subverted to the media’s broader mandate — informing people about what’s happening.

If you start pulling stories or images solely on the grounds that they are “offensive” you aren’t a news organization anymore. You’re just a bromide: a place to scope out the obituaries, Sudoku, and the weather.

One argument I hear whispered is that news outlets don’t need to risk running the pictures that explain their stories because, well, the Internet has that covered. But if you can make that argument for the pictures, why not for the text itself? Why bother publishing newspapers at all? All the facts of the shootings can apparently be gleaned from Gawker.

“Well,” the response comes, “we have to publish the text because that’s the news!”

Ding ding ding! Thanks for playing, folks. And please continue to argue for the editorial irrelevancy of your competing news organization on the way out.

CBC, and every other media outlet, routinely runs content that is “offensive” to people who can be identified as “a group”: Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Scientologists, Conservatives, Communists, etc.

Nothing that I’ve seen of Charlie Hebdo‘s covers meets the standard of hate speech. Were some of the depictions racist? Maybe. Were they offensive to Canadian sensibilities? Sure. It’s fair to criticize Charlie Hebdo‘s covers on that basis. One can even argue they contributed to marginalizing a persecuted minority within France.

But here’s the problem with arguments that try to put the massacre into this broader context. Inevitably they all seem to contain some variant of the cringeworthy line: “I don’t believe cartoonists should take a bullet in the brain for drawing pictures… BUT.”

This weasely assertion is often used to couch an argument that pretends it doesn’t treat terrorism as a legitimate response to racist cartooning.

If the shooting had anything to do with rampant anti-Muslim sentiment in French culture, the perpetrators had countless non-violent means of fighting against that institution. They could protest en masse. They could take their complaints to the courts, as they have in the past. Hell, they could even start their own publication to satirize Charlie Hebdo and the cultural assumptions that allowed it to thrive. What a novel concept!

Instead, they chose to murder 12 people.

Don’t be naive: this isn’t about the racism of the French state. It’s about a trio of fanatics who murdered innocent people for insulting Islam in a bid to frighten others from doing the same. And when Canadian news outlets avoid running the cartoons, the effort succeeds.

In his email to CBC staffers, Mr. Studer continued: “We wouldn’t have published these images before today — not out of fear, but out of respect for the beliefs and sensibilities of the mass of Muslim believers. Why would the actions of a gang of violent thugs force us to change that position? This isn’t the time for emotional responses or bravado. There are better ways to honour and stand beside our fellow journalists.”

It would be more honest to admit we’re scared.

We owe it to the people who died to stop cringing.

If you want to see evidence of this, here’s an example. In the hours after the massacre, cartoonists from around the world channelled their grief and outrage into their art. Cartoons flooded the Internet in tribute — some of them later appeared on front pages.

Many of them are brilliant. Most of them are touching. They speak to a genuine and deeply felt sorrow. But I have yet to find a single one that depicts the Prophet Mohammed. There are broken pencils, bloody ink, terrorists being assailed by pens inscribed with the word “freedom.” Yet none had the courage to exercise the freedom to do what Charlie Hebdo routinely did: draw a silly, blasphemous cartoon.

We owe it to the people who died to stop cringing. We owe it to them, and to our audiences, to show the world what they died for. The only way to mitigate the real risk of violence that a single publication faces is for all publications to act likewise. By spreading the risk around, we minimize it. Publish the hell out of that thing. Put it everywhere. Spray paint it on walls.

The fanatics can’t kill everyone. They can’t target every media outlet. The “Muslim street” can’t riot forever. Sooner or later, it’s for the fanatics to make peace with a non-medieval worldview that can tolerate satire, dissent, and the art of offence.

On Thursday, I opened the papers and saw a lot of headlines along the line of: “We are Charlie Hebdo.” But most editors in this country weren’t brave. Until they get more courage, we’re not Charlie. Charlie is dead.

National Post