Goats vs sheep: The UK media’s handling of Charlie Hebdo

Raymond Snoddy examines how the British media has managed coverage of the Charlie Hebdo story – and asks if it was right or wrong to publish the cover image from the survivor’s issue.

Britain’s national newspapers have divided themselves this week into the sheep and the goats.

There were not that many sheep – only The Times, the Guardian and The Independent.

The goats included the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and Star.

For those who do not remember the holy scripture contained in Matthew 25:31-46, the sheep in this context are the good guys to be welcomed to glory, while the goats are cast aside and cursed.

It was the sheep who arrived at the right decision and published the Charlie Hebdo Tears of Muhammad cartoon in the survivor’s issue – despite everything.

It can’t have been an easy decision either way. The papers who decided to publish – and they were far from alone around the developed world – had to balance conflicting principles and practicalities.

Should the right to free expression always trump the religious affront caused to devout Muslims and the potential danger to staff if such devotion were ever to slide over into ideologically motivated violence? In fact the danger is more than potential as could be seen from the firebomb attack on the offices of the Hamburger Morgenpost after it republished the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

A close call, but on balance the sheep did indeed get it right even though in the case of The Times the article was at the bottom of page five and the Tout Est Pardonne illustration was given the delicate single column treatment. At least it was there.

As a result, The Times, the Guardian and Independent are able to say: “Je Suis Charlie.”

Live blogs on the Telegraph, Mail Online and Mirror decided the best thing to do was to avoid the full frontal cover and show just the merest hint of ankle. As former BBC executive Bill Cotton said in a different context, you can’t be a little bit pregnant.

The BBC included cartoon images on both Newsnight and at least one lunchtime bulletin, but has in the past few days displayed some confusion on what should be shown where and the language used to describe those who murdered journalists, policemen and shoppers in Paris last week.

When the story slips out of the headlines, as all stories eventually do, some thought should be given to what – if any – lessons can be learned for both the media and an increasingly secular British society where religion – of any kind – is no longer a mainspring of social or political life.

Islamic terrorists are not the only martyrs. There are journalist martyrs too, even if none deliberately sought such status. The work of the terrorists already seems counter-productive.

The murders have overnight transformed Charlie Hebdo, a financially failing satirical magazine few outside France had ever heard of, into an international icon of freedom of expression. The irony is it may not even have been a very good magazine – but now has a print run of five million and a firm financial base for the future.

The media should resist all attempts by politicians to use current events as an easy excuse to increase surveillance on every citizen and instead campaign for more resources, so that for a start they would be at least able to target more thoroughly those already known to security services.

Newspapers and broadcasters should renew their commitment to freedom of expression – including the right to offend, and that must include everyone and everything.

As BBC’s PM programme pointed out, the huge sensitivity over the portrayal of Muhammad and other prophets is apparently based on one ambiguous verse in the Koran and had to do with avoidance of worshipping idols, something irrelevant in modern society.

And as historians have pointed out, there were images of Muhammad in 7th Century Persia.

Better efforts should also be made to provide a more holistic, and perhaps more international approach, to covering the atrocities of Muslim terrorists whether they call themselves Boko Haram in Nigeria or Taliban in Pakistan.

Murders closer to home will always be judged more important or relevant by the media. But in an increasingly global society extra efforts should be made to counter the notion that such atrocities are events in far off countries of little relevance to the West. Is it too much to ask that deaths, wherever they happen, should be given greater equality?

How events are described is important too. Newswatch, the BBC Television accountability programme, has in the past received complaints from angry viewers about the BBC’s apparent unwillingness to use the term “terrorist”, however appalling the deeds involved.

The answer came back that the word “terrorist” was not banned and it was up to individual editors to decide what to do. It was just that it was a term that never seemed to be used.

And so it was that that you could hear in the Paris coverage terms such as “hostage-takers” as if it was a career choice, Islamist extremists, gunmen, anything but the terrible word ‘terrorist’.

In many cases the BBC caution is to be applauded – the desire to use measured language which is not pejorative when there are two or more politically plausible sides to a dispute.

But there are occasions when indiscriminate terror is launched on civilian populations in a deliberate attempt to cause terror where euphemisms don’t seem quite up to the task.

A tweet last week on that, and a related subject, got more than 50,000 views and 320 retweets suggesting that others too had noticed the BBC’s delicacy of language.

The BBC’s output is vast and no-one can know what is happening in every outpost. Indeed, BBC Northern Ireland journalist and broadcaster William Crawley got in touch to say he had been using the word terrorist all that day in his coverage. Perhaps in Ulster broadcasters have a better ear for such things.

In a quiet moment BBC news executives should reflect on the ease with which some well-meaning journalists, perhaps seeking to avoid controversy, slip into euphemism.

As for everyone else it would be good if a few more goats joined the courageous sheep.

In the meantime, where is it possible to get your hands on a copy of Charlie Hebdo?