The Associated Press scrambled this week to remove images of Charlie Hebdo’s latest cover from its archives after critics noted the global newswire had violated its stated policy of censoring “deliberately provocative images.”
“12 photos have been taken down from AP Images, which is the commercial photo licensing unit of AP. The photos came from two content partners that have a direct feed into AP Images,” an AP representative said Thursday in response to inquiries from the Washington Post.
The French satirical magazine released an issue this week commemorating the one-year anniversary of a deadly terrorist attack on its staff.
Islamic jihadists stormed Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices in January 2015, killing 10 journalists and two police officers. The murderers cited the magazine’s repeated mockery of Islam and Muhammad as justification for their massacre.
To mark the anniversary, the French magazine released an anniversary issue Wednesday depicting God as rifle-toting terrorist. The covers captions reads, “One year on: The killer is still at large.”
Many critics, including the Vatican, found the new cover distasteful, and the Associated Press seemed to agree.
“We made a determination that showing a caricature of God in this context was just as offensive as showing a caricature of a prophet and hence decided to not to use the cover image,” AP’s vice president and director of photography Santiago Lyon told the Post’s Erik Wemple. However, as noted by Mediaite’s Alex Griswold, the group’s rhetoric failed to match its actions, as he found an AP-sourced image clearly showing Charlie Hebdo’s latest cover.
The AP’s re-publishing of Charlie Hebdo’s latest cover stood in sharp contrast to how it and many other American newsrooms responded in 2015 to the Islamic terrorist attack, Griswold noted. Media outlets everywhere declared immediately after the 2015 attack that they stood with Charlie Hebdo’s right to free expression. However, many of these same groups also refused to republish the magazine’s “provocative” Muhammad cartoons.
“None of the images distributed by AP showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad,” AP spokesman Paul Colford said in 2015.
The AP’s Erin Madigan said at the time in a comment to the Washington Examiner’s media desk, “It has been our policy for years that we refrain from moving deliberately provocative images.”
Variations of these sentiments were echoed at several like-minded U.S. newsrooms, including the New York Times, NPR and the New York Daily News.
The Associated Press’ decision last year to censor Charlie Hebdo was met with no small amount of criticism, especially after critics rightly noted the group’s double standard in publishing offensive images of Jesus Christ.
“Lesson: Once you start censoring, you have to do more censoring to stay consistent,” said the Post’s Erik Wemple said Thursday.
The AP did not respond to the Examiner’s request for comment.
