Week in Review

Danish cartoons

Some stories seem to percolate below the surface for weeks or longer before bursting onto our pages. So it was with a wave of Muslim anger over a set of cartoons that made fun of the prophet Muhammad.

The 12 cartoons first appeared in September in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, angering local Muslims but getting no attention in the United States. The story got a push in mid-January when a Christian newspaper in Norway reprinted the cartoons, but still wasn’t noticed here.

It first came to my attention on Monday, when the Associated Press reported that gunmen had briefly seized a European Union office in the Gaza Strip and that Muslims were calling for a boycott of Danish products.

It was a story that could easily have been dismissed as part of the daily catalog of disturbance and unrest that competes for space on our pages. But it raised interesting questions of free speech versus respect for other cultures, and we carried a 500-word story on an inside page of the Tuesday paper.

Two days later, the wire agencies reported that several French and German newspapers had published the cartoons in what they described as a defense of freedom of the press.

This was a startling departure from the usual European pattern of deference to Muslim sensibilities and had the potential to further inflame the debate. We pieced together a comprehensive story from the wire reports and gave it prominent display on our lead world page.

Whether to publish

By the time we got to work on Thursday, the story was really getting interesting. Mobs were besieging the EU office in Gaza again and, more significantly, diplomats, aid workers and journalists from four European countries were getting out of the territory in the face of death threats.

We promptly contacted Middle East correspondent Joshua Mitnick to ask him to write a story for front page consideration. And at our morning news meeting it was decided that a national desk reporter should contact American newspapers and Muslim groups for their reactions to the dispute.

These news meetings are generally brisk and businesslike; all the editors want to get back to their desks and to work on the day’s stories. But on Thursday, we engaged in a free-wheeling 20-minute discussion over whether The Washington Times should publish any or all of the cartoons.

No one thought we should hold back because of the threat of violence; that part was easy. But it has been a longstanding policy at this newspaper that we should not needlessly offend our readers and that we should never mock anyone’s religion. That was a much tougher call.

It was suggested — and not disputed — that our decision should rest principally on whether seeing the cartoons would contribute to the readers’ understanding of the dispute.

Some suggested that the written descriptions of the cartoons that had appeared in our stories had been fully adequate to understand their nature. Similarly, in the case of various beheadings and other atrocities in Iraq, it had been decided that the written description was adequate and there was no need to publish the pictures.

On the other side, we were reminded of a ruckus last year when Mexico issued a postage stamp featuring Memin Pinguin, a sort of Jim Crow-era image of a black child that has been a popular cartoon character in Mexico since the 1940s. In that case we had published the picture.

One possible option was to use a photograph moved by the AP from Paris on Wednesday night showing a man reading a newspaper in which one of the cartoons was visible. But that seemed to be a bit of a cop-out that avoided addressing the issue head-on.

Nothing was settled at the news meeting; that was a decision to be made later and at a higher level. But the level of interest among our editors made it clear to everyone that this was a story we wanted to follow.

• David W. Jones is the foreign editor of The Washington Times. His e-mail address is djones@washingtontimes.com.