Charlie Hebdo massacre

Focus on a tragic sideshow exposes
fear of confronting the main event

Thursday 8 January, 2015
A trainee policewoman was killed by a gunman in a bullet-proof vest in a Paris street this morning. We can be fairly sure that she will not feature on British national front pages tomorrow.
An unarmed policeman was killed by a gunman in a bullet-proof vest in a Paris street yesterday morning. A photograph of him facing his killer just before the fatal shot was fired was the central image on five British national newspapers- (and a drop-in shot on a sixth) this morning.
Why? Because it was a live news picture? Because it was dramatic? Or simply because it was the only one available? Is that sufficient reason to show any man pleading for his life?
The photograph of Ahmed Merabet was not only insensitive, it added nothing to the understanding of the story it was illustrating: the massacre of the editor of a satirical magazine, four renowned cartoonists and other members of staff.
What's more, in the journalistic jargon, the image had "been around all day". It was a still from an amateur video that had been readily available on mainstream and social media websites since lunchtime, so that by the time the papers reached their public it will have been about 20 hours old. Anyone who wanted to view this mini-snuff movie will have had ample opportunity. That is a key point. Anyone who wanted to see this image could have done so.

For all the hand-wringing about policing the internet, people have the choice not to click. If you have the Times, Mail, Mirror, Star or Sun delivered to your home, you have no choice about what lands on the doormat. You cannot avoid the image. If you are shopping in Tesco or buying cigarettes in Martins, you can hardly avoid the news stand. You - or your children - can't "unsee" a photograph when it's in front of you.
OK, the picture isn't that graphic - a factor the former Sunday Mirror editor Paul Connew puts forward in defending its use - but it is demeaning. The Mirror, Mail and Star did at least pixellate Merabet's face; the Sun and Times did not offer him even that figleaf of dignity. Indeed, the Times turned it into a comic cut by overlaying the final exchange of words between killer and victim in headline type on the picture.
In Connew's view the photograph was too important for editors to withhold from their readers. SubScribe would argue that the casual murder of a policeman who had responded to reports of gunfire was a telling aspect of the day's events that required a place in the overall coverage. But not on page one. To be brutal, Merabet's death could be described as "collateral damage". He was not the target. He got in the way. Heroically so, but his death was not the most important event of the day.
Everyone used the photograph somewhere, although the Express (above) went to the absurd lengths of showing the half of the picture with the gunman and covering the other half with three unrelated photographs.

The Mail went to the other extreme, using a further six shots from the video on its first inside spread.
Remember, this is a story not about the murder of a single policeman, but about a terrorist attack that left 12 dead, including five men who were famous in their home country. A story about the silencing of dissenters, about freedom of speech, about men who knew that their work was dangerous and who accepted that they might die for the freedom to continue. The Mail doesn't get round to showing their faces until page 7.
Nor does it share with its readers the root of these men's deaths - the cartoons that apparently so enraged the two gunmen that they planned and executed this terrible crime.
In this, the paper again adopted the policy of the majority. Even the Independent, whose front page was the best by a country mile, declined to print any of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. The editor Amol Rajan told Radio 4 this morning that he felt very uncomfortable with that decision:

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.
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.

Why should it have been a unilateral decision? Fleet Street is not a price-fixing cartel. There is nothing wrong with editors consulting each other on a matter such as this. They could have reached a joint decision to affirm their freedom in the most obvious way.
As it happens, the Independent would not have been the only newspaper to go ahead. Both the Times, pictured, and the Sun ran a clutch of Charlie Hebdo covers, and the Times included the Mohammed "one hundred lashes if you don't die laughing" cover that prompted the 2011 firebombing of the magazine's offices. The Guardian ran one cover.
It would be interesting to know whether Rajan - and other editors - consulted their staff before resolving to put their safety ahead of telling the story. For, whatever they may say and however understandable their approach, that is what those who declined to publish examples of the murdered cartoonists' work did.
The trick here was not to be gratuitously offensive to one section of society, but to show the work of the Charlie Hebdo team in context, to show that they were irreverent and insulting not only to Islam but also to Judaism, Catholicism, the English and Gerard Depardieu. That is what the Times alone attempted to do - albeit in a small way on an inside page.
Splash headlines characterised this attack as an assault - even a war - on freedom and democracy. Very dramatic, but also very convenient. It was no such thing. This was specifically an attack on freedom of speech, and for all the fine "nous sommes Charlie" sentiments in the leader columns, only two papers had the confidence to exercise and demonstrate that freedom by showing their readers what all the fuss was about. To put it bluntly, the rest bottled out.
The Telegraph was frank in its leader in saying that it didn't carry images of Mohammed with the explanation:

Free speech offers latitude but not necessarily licence. It does not follow that because many newspapers, such as this one, do not publish cartoons of Mohammed that somehow we have been intimidated into not speaking out. Any suggestion that a publication failing to follow Charlie Hebdo’s example is caving in to terrorism is absurd: we all make editorial decisions to avoid offending people that have nothing to do with appeasing militant Islamists.

That takes some swallowing - but the Telegraph could at least demonstrate that it practises what it preaches, since it eschewed that picture of Ahmed Merabet. It was also the only paper to put photographs of the murdered cartoonists on page one. The result was, in SubScribe's view, the second best front of the day.
And for all the carping here, there was plenty to applaud today - particularly the graphics of the deadly five minutes that appeared in the Mail and Times and the Guardian's use (pictured) of its prime centre spread for photographs of people turning out en masse across to show solidarity with Charlie Hebdo.
There was some good analysis - albeit with too little focus on the relevance here of France's fervently secular society or on the juxtaposition with this week's anti-Muslim and anti-intolerance demonstrations in Germany.
And there was serious common sense from David Aaronovitch in the Times and Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, easily the best two reads in print. Online it's worth looking at Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, whose insightful column from France did not find a place in the paper.

Matt and Adams in the Telegraph turned up excellent cartoons where most others avoided the subject. Peter Brookes of the Times, however, struck a rare false note with his as-ever beautifully crafted image that turned the base of the Eiffel Tower into the legs of the black-clad terrorist. Whatever the intention, the impression conveyed is of terrorism striding unchallenged across open land. The people of France were out in force yesterday to show how that is absolutely not the case.
Several newspaper websites have given their cartoonists voice - here is a wonderful little video of Christian Adams of the Telegraph in action - and it would have been good to have seen first person pieces in print. The Sun and Times did at least quote them. We also needed much more from Ian Hislop, although he was doubtless holding his fire as he ponders Private Eye's response.
But the area that needed greatest exploration was the huge turnout of ordinary people to mourn a group of satirists. It was to these crowds that newspapers too afraid - or shall we say circumspect - to use Charlie Hebdo cartoons on their front pages could have turned for the telling image.
Those people gathered in the public squares of France not because a policeman had been killed, but because two murderers had attacked their freedom of expression.
Stéphane Charbonnier and his colleagues died because they refused to relinquish their right to offend.
Today our newspapers (and, to be fair, many overseas) exercised that right, but without endangering their own safety. They chose to risk offending readers who would do them no harm by publishing pictures of a man facing death, a man whose personal tragedy was in reality a sideshow.
But they were too frightened to deal with the main event.