From The New York Times:
Around 9:10 on Monday evening, laughter and a round of applause broke out among the surviving staff members of Charlie Hebdo, followed shortly by cries — joyous if ironic — of “Allahu akbar!”
The group was cheering Rénald Luzier, a cartoonist known as Luz, who on the umpteenth try had produced what the editors thought was the perfect cover image for the most anticipated issue ever of this scrappy, iconoclastic weekly, which will appear on Wednesday. It showed the Prophet Muhammad holding a sign saying, “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”), with the words “All is forgiven” in French above it on a green background.
“Habemus a front page,” Gérard Biard, one of the paper’s top editors, said with a smile, emerging from the staff’s makeshift newsroom and deploying the phrase used to announce a new pope. To find the right image, he said: “We asked ourselves: ‘What do we want to say? What should we say? And in what way?’ About the subject, unfortunately, we had no doubt.”
But the cowards at the NYT aren't publishing the cover photo.
This time around, many media are publishing the cover, which makes the contrast between who is and who isn't very stark. Here's a quick survey of which news outlets did and did not publish a still image of the Charlie Hebdo cover in web stories that were primarily about the cover (BBC showed it in a video, but not on the webpage, for example, so they are still on the "censored"list.)
Media that did not publish the cover image in their Web stories:
Media that did publish the cover image:
(This is not meant to be exhaustive and I will not be updating it, sorry.)
To write an article about the cover image and not publish it is nothing but pure cowardice. It shows that fear of Islamists is far more important to these outlets than actually publishing the news.
I guess the slogan "Je suis Charlie" only goes so far for the media that is covering the story. But the image is certainly being published in places that never published Mohammed cartoons before, which is at least one positive outcome for freedom of the press.
I guess the slogan "Je suis Charlie" only goes so far for the media that is covering the story. But the image is certainly being published in places that never published Mohammed cartoons before, which is at least one positive outcome for freedom of the press.