Can We Run This Without Packing Iron?

All the mainstream U.S. media are terrified to publish this cartoons. Editors are hiding under their desks at The Associated Press, CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC, NBC News and others .

Other media outlets like Gawker, the Daily Beast and BuzzFeed have all published the images.  The Washington Post ran the cartoon on their editorial opinion page.

The New York Times proffered one of their typical gasbag explanations: “Under Times standards, we do not normally publish images or other material deliberately intended to offend religious sensibilities. After careful consideration, Times editors decided that describing the cartoons in question would give readers sufficient information to understand today’s story.” 

Kind of like describing a sunset or texting what a celebrity looks like?

Look, it's not a really good cartoon, it's not particularly well drawn, not really that funny. 

A far cry from this classic. 

But it's news. It probably says something like: 100 lashes if you don't think this is funny. 

The New York Times: Source 

A Close Call on Publication of Charlie Hebdo Cartoons

By MARGARET SULLIVAN

  JANUARY 8, 2015 2:18 PM  January 8, 2015 2:18 pm

Was The Times cowardly and lacking in journalistic solidarity when it decided not to publish the images from the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that precipitated the execution of French journalists?

Some readers I’ve heard from certainly think so. Evan Levine of New York City wrote: “I just wanted to register my extreme disappointment at what can only be described as a dereliction of leadership and responsibility by the New York Times in deciding not to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons after today’s massacre.”

Todd Stuart of Key West, Fla., expressed the same view: “I hope the public editor looks into the incredibly cowardly decision of the NYT not to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. I can’t think of anything more important than major papers like the NYT standing up for the most basic principles of freedom.”

And many outside commenters and press critics agreed. Jeff Jarvis of City University of New York wrote: “If you’re the paper of record, if you’re the highest exemplar of American journalism, if you expect others to stand by your journalists when they are threatened, if you respect your audience to make up its own mind, then dammit stand by Charlie Hebdo and inform your public. Run the cartoons.”

I talked to the executive editor, Dean Baquet, on Thursday morning about his decision not to show the images of the prophet Muhammad – a position that was taken by The Washington Post (on its news pages), The Associated Press, CNN and many other American news organizations. BuzzFeed and theHuffington Post were among those that did publish the cartoons.

The Washington Post’s editorial page published a single image of a Charlie Hebdo cover on its printed Op-Ed page with Charles Lane’s column; that decision was made by the editorial page editor, not the executive editor of the paper, who presides over the news content. The executive editor, Martin Baron, told the Post’s media reporter Paul Farhi that the paper doesn’t publish material “that is pointedly, deliberately, or needlessly offensive to members of religious groups.”

A number of European newspapers did publish the images, often on their front pages or prominently on their websites.

I found it interesting that at least one outspoken champion of free expression, Glenn Greenwald, questioned the solidarity angle, tweeting: “When did it become true that to defend someone’s free speech rights, one has to publish & even embrace their ideas? That apply in all cases?”

And even many people who were horrified by the attack have become troubled by the embrace of a paper they believe crossed the line into bigotry.

Mr. Baquet told me that he started out the day Wednesday convinced that The Times should publish the images, both because of their newsworthiness and out of a sense of solidarity with the slain journalists and the right of free expression.

He said he had spent “about half of my day” on the question, seeking out the views of senior editors and reaching out to reporters and editors in some of The Times’s international bureaus. They told him they would not feel endangered if The Times reproduced the images, he told me, but he remained concerned about staff safety.

“I sought out a lot of views, and I changed my mind twice,” he said. “It had to be my decision alone.”

Ultimately, he decided against it, he said, because he had to consider foremost the sensibilities of Times readers, especially its Muslim readers. To many of them, he said, depictions of the prophet Muhammad are sacrilegious; those that are meant to mock even more so. “We have a standard that is long held and that serves us well: that there is a line between gratuitous insult and satire. Most of these are gratuitous insult.”

“At what point does news value override our standards?” Mr. Baquet asked. “You would have to show the most incendiary images” from the newspaper; and that was something he deemed unacceptable.

I asked Mr. Baquet about a different approach — something much more moderate, along the lines of what the Post’s Op-Ed page did in print.

“Something like that is probably so compromised as to become meaningless,” he responded, though he was speaking generally, not of The Post’s decision.

The Times undoubtedly made a careful and conscientious decision in keeping with its standards. However, given these events — and an overarching story that is far from over — a review and reconsideration of those standards may be in order in the days ahead.

My brief conversation with Rbt. Hughes plus a better story by Ben Genocchio

I got to hang out with Mr. Robert Hughes once. Here is a photo of us practicing irritable looks having a beer at an alternative art space in Westchester. Actually got on and I got to ask him about Andy Warhol to see if his view had softened at all. Mr. Hughes was famous for hating Warhol and he said "...yes in retrospect, Warhol was good and important." Mr. Hughes talked like Hemingway. He went on to say that it was the people around Andy that were so horrible and that ruined the experience for viewing his art. We had a nice time until I mentioned my German gallerest. "What the f***k is a galleriest?" Mr. Hughes asked. I explained that they called themselves that if they did not sell secondary market or dead guy art. A galleriest deals in living artists only. "Bullshit" Mr Hughes exclaimed crushing a Fosters can on his forehead with one hand. 

By Benjamin Genocchio  Here is a story about this famous critic by a real writer!

Published: August 7, 2012

For more than four years, I had the assignment to pre-write critic Robert Hughes’s obituary for the New York Times. I was a young critic at the newspaper, and coming from Australia seemed the right person for the assignment. I never wrote the piece.

Part of my reluctance to finish the assignment was perhaps understandable: By the time I was assigned to the obit Hughes had already cemented himself as the greatest art critic of our time. His popular history books had broadened his audience and made him a personality, as they say. He was a minor celebrity in his own right.

 

For a baby critic living in Australia, I grew up in awe of Hughes. He was a towering literary figure who it seemed to me was trapped in a minor genre. Looking back, he was the greatest prose stylist since Ruskin to write art criticism. He was also a near ubiquitous presence in publishing and on television, defining my views on art.

But Hughes influenced and changed me in other ways. He legitimized art criticism as something worthy, even valuable. He made it seem like it was the most important thing in the world. I wanted to be him; at the least, I wanted to write like him.

There is no imitating Hughes’s literary style, and believe me I tried. His combination of highbrow erudition and gritty vernacular gave his writing a distinctive tone along with his astonishing wit and flair. I’ll never forget the first time I read his description of the groupies that hung around Warhol’s factory as “social space debris.”

Part of Hughes’s fame derived from his ability to exploit television as a new vehicle for disseminating his ideas, most famously with the BBC series “Shock of the New,” which was seen by more than 25 million viewers worldwide when it first aired in 1980. Four decades later the book of the same name remains in print.

But another part of his legend derived from his platform, Time Magazine, the global weekly magazine which was to some extent the internet of its age — you could buy it and read Hughes anywhere in the world. He got to define art to a global audience in a way that no other critic has enjoyed before or since. Television only increased his reach. 

Years later, meeting Hughes here in New York where eventually I also came to work, I was struck by his roughness of character, which is very Australian actually, and his astonishing erudition. He was very much like his writing, a mixture of high and low that appalled and excited in equal measure. He was coarse, crude, and yet brilliant.

I am not going to venture any views on his critical opinions of art and artists, most of which were shaped in the early 1960s and which, by the 1990s, increasingly seemed out of touch with developments in contemporary art. He found little to like, turning into a kind of reactionary crank. Eventually he gave up writing reviews altogether.

And yet reviewing his writing he also seems astonishingly prescient: He prophesied and decried the colonization of the art world by money and the celebration of empty celebrity. He was direct, even insulting in his views of those whom he disliked, making sport of “fraudulent” artists and “fawning” collectors and curators. All of which, however, made his writing an enjoyably compelling read.

I would see him occasionally at openings and at dinners, hobbling on his cane after a car accident in 1999 that nearly cost him his life. I pitied his physical decline, though he still commanded an audience. He had gravitas, and was very much aware of it. He was one of those people who upon entering a room everyone turned to admire.

I prefer to remember him, however, as more than this, as the kind of god of criticism that he was to a generation of young writers like myself. He could turn a phrase on a dime, he could paint and write poetry, he could speak Latin, Spanish, and Italian — he was a polymath in an age of imbeciles. He was, in short an intellectual warrior, fierce in his views, frequently combative, but ever passionate about the necessity of art.

Benjamin Genocchio, a former art critic for the New York Times, is editor in chief of artinfo.com.

by Benjamin GenocchioPublished: August 7, 2012For more than four years, I had the assignment to pre-write critic Robert Hughes’s obituary for the New York Times. I was a young critic at the newspaper, and coming from Australia seemed the right person for the assignment. I never wrote the piece.
Part of my reluctance to finish the assignment was perhaps understandable: By the time I was assigned to the obit Hughes had already cemented himself as the greatest art critic of our time. His popular history books had broadened his audience and made him a personality, as they say. He was a minor celebrity in his own right.

 For a baby critic living in Australia, I grew up in awe of Hughes. He was a towering literary figure who it seemed to me was trapped in a minor genre. Looking back, he was the greatest prose stylist since Ruskin to write art criticism. He was also a near ubiquitous presence in publishing and on television, defining my views on art.
But Hughes influenced and changed me in other ways. He legitimized art criticism as something worthy, even valuable. He made it seem like it was the most important thing in the world. I wanted to be him; at the least, I wanted to write like him.
There is no imitating Hughes’s literary style, and believe me I tried. His combination of highbrow erudition and gritty vernacular gave his writing a distinctive tone along with his astonishing wit and flair. I’ll never forget the first time I read his description of the groupies that hung around Warhol’s factory as “social space debris.”
Part of Hughes’s fame derived from his ability to exploit television as a new vehicle for disseminating his ideas, most famously with the BBC series “Shock of the New,” which was seen by more than 25 million viewers worldwide when it first aired in 1980. Four decades later the book of the same name remains in print.
But another part of his legend derived from his platform, Time Magazine, the global weekly magazine which was to some extent the internet of its age — you could buy it and read Hughes anywhere in the world. He got to define art to a global audience in a way that no other critic has enjoyed before or since. Television only increased his reach. 
Years later, meeting Hughes here in New York where eventually I also came to work, I was struck by his roughness of character, which is very Australian actually, and his astonishing erudition. He was very much like his writing, a mixture of high and low that appalled and excited in equal measure. He was coarse, crude, and yet brilliant.
I am not going to venture any views on his critical opinions of art and artists, most of which were shaped in the early 1960s and which, by the 1990s, increasingly seemed out of touch with developments in contemporary art. He found little to like, turning into a kind of reactionary crank. Eventually he gave up writing reviews altogether.
And yet reviewing his writing he also seems astonishingly prescient: He prophesied and decried the colonization of the art world by money and the celebration of empty celebrity. He was direct, even insulting in his views of those whom he disliked, making sport of “fraudulent” artists and “fawning” collectors and curators. All of which, however, made his writing an enjoyably compelling read.
I would see him occasionally at openings and at dinners, hobbling on his cane after a car accident in 1999 that nearly cost him his life. I pitied his physical decline, though he still commanded an audience. He had gravitas, and was very much aware of it. He was one of those people who upon entering a room everyone turned to admire.
I prefer to remember him, however, as more than this, as the kind of god of criticism that he was to a generation of young writers like myself. He could turn a phrase on a dime, he could paint and write poetry, he could speak Latin, Spanish, and Italian — he was a polymath in an age of imbeciles. He was, in short an intellectual warrior, fierce in his views, frequently combative, but ever passionate about the necessity of art.
Benjamin Genocchio, a former art critic for the New York Times, is editor in chief of artinfo.com.