The Breakfast Meeting: YouTube\'s Balancing Act, and an App Aims for Stardom

September 17, 2012, 9:45 am

By NOAM COHEN

Google rejected a request from the White House last week to pull “The Innocence of Muslims” from its YouTube service in light of the spreading protests of the video in the Muslim world. At the same time, it did temporarily block the video from Egypt and Libya, where the protests have been the most fierce â€" and that, in a nutshell, is the tricky situation Google faces in trying to fashion a policy on the acceptability of content viewed around the world, Somini Sengupta writes. Google quickly determined that the video - which depicts the Prophet Muhammad as a child molester and thug, among other things - did not violate its hate speech rules or any law, but nonetheless took it down in Egypt and Libya “give n the very sensitive situation” there.

• To explain the intense reaction to “The Innocence of Muslims,” David D. Kirkpatrick writes, you must look at more than “religious sensitivity, political demagogy or resentment of Washington.” There is an appeal to freedom made by Egyptian protesters and their sympathizers that cuts very differently than the freedom of speech that is cited in the West: “The right of a community, whether Muslim, Christian or Jewish, to be free from grave insult to its identity and values.”
• One of the men behind “The Innocence of Muslims,” Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, was questioned by federal probation authorities in California over the weekend, Ian Lovett reported. Among the questions they may have asked Mr. Nakoula, who was convicted in a 2010 check-kiting case, was whether he uploaded the video to YouTube. The terms of his sentencing included a restriction against using the Internet without permission from a probation officer.

Can smartphone apps become the grist for a big-screen movie? Count Hollywood as on the fence with that question, Brooks Barnes writes, as it considers what to do with the  popular app Talking Friends, in which cartoon animals “respond to a user's touch and repeat (almost) anything in funny voices.” The company behind the app, Outfit7, guided by William Morris Endeavor, are pursuing movie and television deals based on its characters. But the record of movies from video games is spotty, in part, the industry believes, because movies lack the personal control built into video games. Add in the broad appeal of apps, which makes it harder to tailor a movie to a certain audience, and app-based movies can seem like a hard sell.

• That said, the video-game-based film “Resident Evil: Retribution,” the fifth in a series, was No. 1 at North American theaters over the weekend. Its take was about $21.1 million, according to Hollywood.com. The story of the weekend was that two art-house films - “The Master” and “Arbitrage” - drew crowds in limited release, ArtsBeat blog reported, “a reflection of how starved filmgoers are for sophisticated cinema.”

The agreement by reporters to allow sources to approve their quotes before publication can seem like the final stage of journalism turning into Kabuki, David Carr writes, and can stamp out any trace of spontaneity in an article. The practice has become widespread in political journalism, but, as it turns out, it is common in business reporting, too. There is a palpable loss from the process, Mr. Carr writes: “Keep in mind that when public figures get in trouble for something they said, it is usually not because they misspoke, but because they accidentally told the truth.”