Charlie Hebdo shooting: Debate over publishing the Muhammad cartoons

While it is a legitimate debate to have over whether or not to publish the cartoons given fear of giving offence or further stirring things up, my sense is that editors have made a blanket decision rather than looking at the cartoons and selecting some that are not gratuitous but make valid points.

My example would be the one above:

Studer said the CBC decided against running the cartoons, arguing that to show those depictions of Muhammad would needlessly offend Muslims, who consider such depictions sacrilege.

And he wasn’t alone in putting forward that argument. The New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet told the paper’s public editor he spent about half of the day deciding whether or not to publish the cartoons, changing his mind twice before ultimately deciding not to run the images.

“We have a standard that is long held and that serves us well: that there is a line between gratuitous insult and satire. Most of these are gratuitous insult,” Baquet said.

The Washington Post ran one image on its editorial pages while the main U.S. networks, including ABC News, CNN and Fox backed off from publishing the cartoons. The Associated Press also declined to make them available.

In Canada, of the Toronto-based newspapers, only the National Post ran the controversial cartoons. Almost none of the U.K. papers ran the cartoons, nor did the BBC and the Paris-based papers Le Monde or Le Figaro.

Charlie Hebdo shooting: Debate over publishing the Muhammad cartoons – World – CBC News.

And in Quebec media, which apart from the Montreal Gazette, widely published some of the cartoons:

Publier les caricatures ou pas?