Other media are showing the new Charlie Hebdo cover though.
This week’s publication, the first issue of the French satirical weekly since last Wednesday’s deadly attack in Paris, will be offered in 16 languages.
The surviving members of the magazine prepared the edition in the offices of French newspaper Liberation, which said three million copies would be printed.
“Charlie Hebdo will be in kiosks this Wednesday, January 14. Like it is every week,” Liberation said.
“The journalists of the weekly publication finished it at around 21.30 on Monday.”
The first cover of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo after a terrorist shooting at its Paris headquarters has been revealed. As expected, the cover defiantly features the Prophet Muhammed, in response to the radical Muslim gunmen’s efforts to silence the often controversial magazine.
The Guardian – but with a warning at the top.
Warning: this article contains the image of the magazine cover, which some may find offensive.
The front cover of Wednesday’s edition of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the first since last week’s attack on its offices which left 12 people dead, is a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.
The cover shows the prophet shedding a tear and holding up a sign reading “Je suis Charlie” in sympathy with the dead journalists. The headline says “all is forgiven”.
The two gunmen who launched the attack on the magazine’s offices last Wednesday killed five of the country’s top cartoonists, saying that they wanted to avenge the prophet for Charlie Hebdo’s satire of him.
The grieving journalists who survived the murderous assault promised it would be business as usual at the weekly publication.
A record 3m copies are to be printed, in 16 languages, after the massacre triggered a worldwide debate on free speech and brought more than 4m people on to the streets of France in a unity march on Sunday.
They should have left the warning off.
The eight-page edition went to the presses on Monday night, according to Libération, the newspaper which offered Charlie Hebdo staff temporary working space following the attack.
The cover cartoon was drawn by the weekly’s cartoonist Luz who survived the massacre because he was late arriving at the office.
Then they do what I’m doing – give a rundown of some other media who show the cover.
Newspapers around Europe, including Libération, Le Figaro and Frankfurter Allgemeine have used the image online. The BBC showed it briefly during a newspaper review on Newsnight. In the US, USA Today and the LA Times ran the cover but the New York Times did not. The Guardian – which has not published other Charlie Hebdo covers with images representing the prophet – is running this cover as its news value warrants publication.
Good, and yes it does, but they should have skipped the warning.
Here’s a better “warning” (in the form of a sticker, heh):
“This magazine contains material on the ‘Prophet’ Mohammad. Mohammad’s revelations are beliefs, not facts, about the origin of Islam. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”
Get it? If I had the job of putting up a stupid “warning” that is what I would write. 😛
The Daily News and NY Post are showing it. Good!
That’s a start. There needs to be a full listing of the papers that have the guts to print the Hebdo cover (WaPo, LA Times, even USA Today), and the non-Charlie media refusing to print – NYT for example. That will help me decide where to search my news going forward.
Ophelia, your Guardian link is wrong.
Thanks for posting this bunch of news and comments. I don’t need to agree on everything with you, do I?, so, for example, I don’t really care about the warning in The Guardian. Also, maybe I feel a little ambiguous about your insistance on Charlie Hebdo’s antiracism — you’ve made your point, and many people won’t listen right now… though maybe it’s dejection on my part.
But otherwise, thanks to you, to many of your commenters, and to SC especially, for providing here a place for mourning. I feel terribly sad for these people — they’re my own, as you say, and they fought valiantly for our right to speak, to laugh, to point fingers. Not only them; I’ve just read an article (in French) about the widows that brought tears to my eyes. They, and their friends and families, shared a terrible risk consciously, and are as much my heros and defenders as the artists and columnists themselves.
Of course I hurt for the people who were just passing by, but the Charlie workers corageously laughed, blasphemed, and spoke for me and others. I’d like to celebrate Lassana Bathily and I’m so sorry for the woman who opened Charlie Hebdo’s doors to the murderers. And yes, I can think about Raif Badawi too, thanks to you and others who speak about him.
(Sorry if this is too emotional and rambling.)
I think the warning is fine. If people are really upset if they see a drawing of Mohammed, it seems okay to warn them. I don’t think such warnings should be mandatory or anything like that, but I also don’t think they’re harmful. Seems similar to a trigger warning — I’m not saying it’s the same thing, just saying it’s the same kind of consideration towards people who might be upset or affected by a specific type of image.
Am I wrong? If so, why?
Lukas #3:
Because it’s an unwarranted surrender of public space to authoritarian ideologues.
Trigger warnings exist to protect the victims of abuse, members of stigmatised groups, etc. from reasonably-inferrable psychological harm. They aren’t appropriate just to protect the self-righteous feelings of those who cannot tolerate dissent from their pet ideology.
Iain Walker, #4,
I’m not sure it does equal surrender of the space. To me what it says is, here it is, but if you are going to be offended, then don’t look. It may be a heavy-handed example of conspicuously responsible free speech. (And I’m not going to try to defend that idea, but I note that some people believe in such distinctions.)
They have published the image. It is there for the public to see, just a short way down the page.
It sadly reflects the reality that there are some people, even people who condemn the murders, who will be offended by the image. It doesn’t constitute a craven capitulation (which refusing to show the image might), but it does say that the Guardian is allowing people to make the choice of whether to see something which might offend them.
The visual media use disclaimers all the time, and not just to protect people who might belong to an identifiable group with a specific trigger, but also to give a choice to people with delicate sensibilities.
Beyond demonstrating in earnest a point of principle is there a practical reason to not only show the image, but also to avoid the warning? Does a warning seriously damage the overall message? Does it send a particularly dangerous or harmful message?
archivistkristine, I see what you did there. 🙂
I’m very disappointed that neither of the Detroit newspapers, The Detroit News nor The Detroit Free Press, have shown the cover…at least so far.
So we really, really want to see the picture of the brown-skinned, bearded, long-nosed muslim again and again on 24 hour rolling news and prominently on every other outlet possible – do we? Because we can. We must. Perhaps it could acquire its own meaning separately from the satirical point it is making: it could become a rallying point for freedom-lovers, islamophobes and racists alike? The dawn of a new era? A declaration in image form, “We have had enough!” (…of immigrants, foreigners, asylum seekers and muslims, especially muslims…)