The Times’s decision last January not to print images of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad brought more mail to this office than just about anything else in recent memory. Many readers felt the images were newsworthy after the massacre at the offices of the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
Explaining his position, Dean Baquet, the executive editor, said The Times did not wish to gratuitously offend religious sensibilities.
Since then, I’ve heard from readers a few times after the paper published images they believe fall into the same category. The most recent example came in ArtsBeat, which, covering protests by Roman Catholics in Milwaukee over a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI made from condoms, published an image of the artwork.
Readers want to know why this image is acceptable but Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were not. Daniel Harper, a Florida reader, tweeted and wrote to me about it, asking, “Why was this picture of the Pope, potentially offensive to Christians, printed whereas your paper refuses to print cartoons and images of Muhammad that may offend Muslims?”
The Times’s publication of the image has provoked other commentary, including a piece in Mediaite, in which Alex Griswold criticized “an intentional double standard.” And the Catholic Church’s dismay drew a jibe from the journalist Matt Taibbi.
The standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, fielded an inquiry about this from The Washington Examiner.
Here’s how he responded:
There’s no simple, unwavering formula we can apply in situations like this. We really don’t want to gratuitously offend anyone’s deeply held beliefs. That said, it’s probably impossible to avoid ever offending anyone. We have to make these judgments all the time. Reasonable people might disagree about any one of them.
I don’t think these situations — the Milwaukee artwork and the various Muhammad caricatures — are really equivalent. For one thing, many people might disagree, but museum officials clearly consider this Johnson piece to be a significant artwork. Also, there’s no indication that the primary intent of the portrait is to offend or blaspheme (the artist and the museum both say that it is not intended to offend people but to raise a social question about the fight against AIDS). And finally, the very different reactions bear this out. Hundreds of thousands of people protested worldwide, for instance, after the Danish cartoons were published some years ago. While some people might genuinely dislike this Milwaukee work, there doesn’t seem to be any comparable level of outrage.