French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons are intentionally provocative forms of “hate speech” that are undeserving of protection, former NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos argued in a lengthy op-ed, adding also that it was right for NPR not to republish the cartoons following January’s deadly terrorist attack in Paris.
“I am not Charlie,” Schumacher-Matos wrote Sunday on NPR’s web site in an article titled “Last Thoughts: NPR And The Balance Between Ethics And The Nation.”
“The French news media may have their ethical standards, but they are not American or sacred universal ones, and they shouldn’t be French ones, either. The United States has never had absolute freedom of the press. And the framers of the Constitution—I once held the James Madison Visiting Professor Chair on First Amendment Issues at Columbia University—never intended it to.
“You wouldn’t know this, however, from listening to the First Amendment fundamentalists piping up from Washington to Silicon Valley,” he added.
Islamic extremists in January stormed the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, killing 10 journalists and two police officers. The terrorist attack was in response to the magazine’s publication of multiple cartoons satirizing Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
“I do not know if American courts would find much of what Charlie Hebdo does to be hate speech unprotected by the Constitution, but I know — hope? — that most Americans would. It is one thing to lampoon popes, imams, rabbis and other temporal religious leaders of this world; it is quite another to make fun, in often nasty ways, of their prophets and gods,” Schumacher-Matos’ said in his article. “The NPR editors were right not to reprint any of the images.”
He did not explain why he did not include the Islamic prophet among other “other temporal religious leaders of this world.”
Schumacher-Matos insisted that “none of this is to justify the bombing. That was far worse still. But France itself is now undergoing a soul searching about how it treats its Muslim minority,” he added.
For some media critics, however, Schumacher-Matos is off point with his take on the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
“I think the First Amendment exists exactly to protect offensive speech and offensive press content such as the Charlie Hebdo satire,” media critic Steven Buttry told the Washington Examiner. “Inoffensive content needs no protection, because no one seeks to repress it. I agree with Edward’s characterization of the offensive nature of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, which lampooned not just temporal leaders such as popes and imams but spiritual figures such as Muhammad.”
“But I think the First Amendment protects exactly such expressions as well as the hateful expressions of racists, communists, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and other offensive groups. I think James Madison and other founders were clear in their desire to protect not only the practice of religion but the criticism of religion, government and whatever else we choose to criticize. And they wisely did not limit our forms of criticism to thoughtful writing. The First Amendment was written in a time when satire was flourishing, and I think it would and should protect satire today,” he said.
NPR was one of a handful of news organizations that chose in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack not to republish images of the cartoons that supposedly provoked the slaughter.
Days after the attack, NPR justified this decision by arguing that it would be “misleading” to publish only a handful of the controversial cartoons. In order to give its audience a complete picture of the situation, standards and practices editor Mark Memmott argued in an article titled “Why You’re Not Seeing Those ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Cartoons,” NPR would have to publish much more than a mere handful.
“[J]ust because offensive images are part of a story does not mean a news organization must publish or post them with its news reports,” NPR’s standards and practices editor Mark Memmott wrote.
“In this case, posting just a few of the cover images of the Prophet Muhammad that Charlie Hebdo published could be misleading. The images the magazine has put on its cover, for example, might be less offensive to some viewers than the more graphic cartoons that have appeared inside the magazine. Those include caricatures of a naked prophet.”
NPR has also declined to publish images of brutal executions carried out by ISIS.
