The editor of the Independent has said “every instinct” told him to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons caricaturing the prophet Muhammad but described it as “too much of a risk”.
The newspaper, along with the rest of the UK’s national press, did not reprint any of the satirical magazine’s caricatures of Muhammad or the cartoons from Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten, with which Charlie Hebdo first provoked international outrage in 2006.
Amol Rajan instead put a striking cartoon by Dave Brown on his paper’s front page on Thursday, showing a hand with the middle finger raised emerging from the cover of Charlie Hebdo. But he was “very uncomfortable” with his decision not to reprint Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons, which he described as “self-censorship”.
Rajan said he had a duty to his staff and had to “balance principle with pragmatism”.
“Every instinct that you have as an editor is to publish and be damned. You don’t like the idea of self-censorship, you don’t like the idea that you grant a victory to these religious fanatics by not publishing something that instinctively you would like to,” Rajan told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday.
“But the fact is as an editor you have got to balance principle with pragmatism, and I felt yesterday evening a few different conflicting principles: I felt a duty to readers; a duty to the dead; I felt a duty to journalism – and I also felt a duty to my staff.
“I think it would have been too much of a risk to unilaterally decide in Britain to be the only newspaper that went ahead and published so in a sense it is true one has self-censored in a way I feel very uncomfortable with. It’s an incredibly difficult decision to make.”
“What’s happened here is a bunch of religious fanatics have tried to silence cartoonists, have tried to silence satire. I think the important thing is not just whether you should show the prophet Muhammad, but to say that those cartoonists wouldn’t be silenced,” he said.
Rajan added that the decision to put a cartoon on the front page was in part a practical decision not “to be overtaken by events”.
Peter Huth, editor of German newspaper BZ, which did publish a series of Charlie Hebdo cartoons, said: “I must say we are not so totally different in the end because we both published cartoons.”
“We worked with the same tool to express our emotions, we did it in a slightly different way,” he told Today.
“We printed 43 covers that Charlie Hebdo printed over the last three or four years, not only dealing with Islamic issues but also with French politics … because they are a satirical magazine.
“What we wanted to do was honour their bravery, what they showed over all those years, and the other point we were thinking about was just journalistic, we had to explain to our readers what is Charlie Hebdo.”