Pamela Geller wants the media to publish the cartoon that won her “Draw Muhammad” contest Sunday in Garland, Tex. It was submitted by illustrator Bosch Fawstin as part of the event that drew an attack from two gunmen who were shot dead by a police officer. “The man risks his life and the American media won’t show the cartoon. It’s shameful,” said Geller in an interview earlier this week on Fox News.
That U.S. news organizations haven’t trafficked in any images from Geller’s event isn’t surprising. Many mainstream outlets, after all, refrained from republishing cartoons depicting Muhammad that had run in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo prior to the Jan. 7 terrorist attack on the publication’s Paris offices. Even so, there was a wide-ranging debate on the media’s handling of this sensitive matter.
This time, not so much. News organizations have indeed stayed away from the images coming out of the contest, which was organized by Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), though there hasn’t been nearly as much discussion on the merits.
Scott Wilson, deputy national editor at the Washington Post, suggests a reason: “The attackers didn’t react to the cartoons, as they did in Paris killings, they reacted to the event. So the cartoons themselves seemed beside the point,” notes Wilson in a statement.
Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of the Washington Post (and boss of the Erik Wemple Blog), told us that the topic didn’t stir much debate internally. “My sense was that her event was intended to be provocative, and I didn’t think the cartoons themselves were particularly interesting or even intended to be so, in contrast with the Charlie Hebdo case,” notes Hiatt in an e-mail.
We sought similar feedback from a number of other news organizations — specifically, on whether they’d had discussions about the decision to publish or not publish any material from Geller’s event. Fox News responded that top editorial officials had indeed discussed the issue — the cable channel approaches these things on a case-by-case basis — and had decided not to republish the cartoons in this case.
The Associated Press is sticking with the policy that it laid out following the Charlie Hebdo massacre: “AP tries hard not to be a conveyor belt for images and actions aimed at mocking or provoking people on the basis of religion, race or sexual orientation.” An AP source indicates there was no discussion about making an exception from previous policy following the Garland episode.
ABC News responded by confirming that it hasn’t run the images. It didn’t say whether it had considered doing so. CNN responded but declined to comment. We are awaiting comment from three others.
