I get tens of requests from friends and relatives asking me to go to this or that media website and vote on a poll about "Those Cartoons".

Whichever side of the discussion you fall on, personally I feel that a news organ running a poll on whether to run the cartoons or not is like the police taking a poll on whether to punish a criminal or not. Of course, the BBC might do it a little more subtly by asking what they are rather than whether to run them; but as a Western leader once put it, "Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?"