Evening Standard: How offensive can newspapers be?
By David Rowan
YOU could hear the editors cheering this week as the Government announced the press should continue to regulate itself. By rejecting calls for Ofcom, the new communications watchdog, to control newspaper content, ministers gave the thumbs-up to continued self-regulation under the Press Complaints Commission. As Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt pledged yesterday, "the free press will remain free".
But just how free should its leading voices - its columnists and cartoonists, in particular - be to publish offensive or divisive material? The main constraints on unfettered opinion have traditionally been the libel laws and, occasionally, a paper's commercial imperative to maintain circulation. Yet two controversial recent cases have prompted intense debate about where the limits should lie.
Last week, Scotland Yard said it was investigating an allegedly racist column by Taki in The Spectator that blamed the New Year's Day shootings in Birmingham on "black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs".
Taki accused Britain's West Indian community of "multiply[ing] like flies". Peter Herbert, a lawyer who complained about the 11 January column, says he subsequently received death threats and 40 abusive emails after his objections were reported. He now wants Boris Johnson, The Spectator's editor and Tory MP, to be prosecuted "for aiding and abetting incitement of racist hate material".
Over at The Independent, cartoonist Dave Brown has been receiving abusive mail of his own, owing to a depiction of Israel's Prime Minister that was printed on 27 January. The cartoon, based on Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children, shows Ariel Sharon appealing to voters by biting into the flesh of a Palestinian baby.
According to an email campaign led by the New Jersey-based lobbying group HonestReporting.com, the cartoon resembles "something out of Der Sturmer", the propaganda sheet from the Nazi era in Germany. The Israeli Embassy in London, among dozens of complainants to the PCC, argues that such an "anti-Semitic" cartoon perpetuates the medieval "blood libel" that Jews murder gentile children for their blood.
Brown denies that he had any anti-Semitic intent, and considers the blood libel to be so "ludicrously untrue" as to make such an allegation against him laughable. "I think a lot of the people who were offended wanted to be offended, for their own political reasons," he says. "It's quite obvious the Israeli Embassy contacted various Jewish groups, and complaints got passed around on the web." The Independent's editor, Simon Kelner, insists that, as a Jew himself, he "would be sensitive to anything anti-Semitic". He defends the "powerful" cartoon as anti-Sharon, but certainly not anti-Semitic.
Nonsense, responds Anthony Julius, the lawyer who successfully defended Deborah Lipstadt against David Irving's libel claim, and who is now pushing for a PCC adjudication against the Independent. "It is anti-Semitic, in a fantastically irresponsible way, at a particularly volatile time." The Taki column, by contrast, leaves far less room for misinterpretation. Its assertions - that, for instance, "the Rivers of Blood speech by Enoch Powell in the Sixties was prophetic as well as true" - are clearly targeted at a particular ethnic group, and as such, Peter Herbert believes, breach section 19 of the Public Order Act, 1986.
Boris Johnson has called the column "a terrible thing" that "should never have gone in", but shows no sign of ending Taki's arrangement - although he has declined to say whether the columnist will continue as a fixture.
Even the proprietor, Lord Black, has publicly taken issue with Taki's acknowledged "soi-disant anti-Semitism" in the past, denouncing a 2001 column for "lies worthy of Goebbels". Yet at the time, Lord Black was wary of censoring his columnist. "Writers, like everyone else, have the right to dislike individuals and whole nationalities and ethnic groups," he wrote.
"They have the right to express their dislike if they do so rationally, are not legally defamatory, and if they are within the bounds of civilised taste." To censor him "would be to accept a muzzle on freedom of expression".
THIS time, commentators wonder if Lord Black will be quite so tolerant. "Yes, Taki's entitled to free speech, but he's not entitled to break the law," says Bill Hagerty, editor of the British Journalism Review. "Somebody at The Spectator made a mistake." Peter Wilby, editor of the New Statesman, says he would not have printed the column. "We all read Taki because he's so outrageous, but you simply should not be using a mainstream publication to say 'they breed like flies'. Though attracting attention does get you more readers - that's why editors sail close to the wind." On occasion, Wilby has sailed a little too close: last year he apologised for a New Statesman cover alleging "a kosher conspiracy" - an honest mistake, he says now, caused by a failure to appreciate the Jewish community's historic sensitivities.
Few editors believe columnists should be sacked for their views.
Francis Wheen believes that newspapers would be "jolly dull" without provocative columnists, even though he dismisses Taki as a "Caliban with a computer who has nothing to say".
Anthony Julius, for all his concerns about " hate speech", believes free speech (within the law) rather than censorship is the way forward.
That may bring a columnist in conflict with his or her title - as was shown vividly last month when an Evening Standard editorial empathised with readers "who were rightly offended" by an AN Wilson column on Israel. The newspaper "fundamentally disagrees with the opinions expressed by Mr Wilson, but as with all its columnists, allows him freedom of expression".
Peter Hill, editor of The Daily Star, thinks there are too many commentators who are "too righton and miss the point". Better to go over the top occasionally than be bland," he says.
Martin Rowson was once asked to draw Alan Yentob for The Independent's magazine, but his caricature's "enormously long nose" was repeatedly rejected as potentially anti-Semitic. "I'm afraid it did look like a hideous caricature from Der Sturmer - but that's what Yentob looks like," Rowson admits.
"I ended up drawing him with no nose at all. The next week it was Frank Bruno. I said I'd try not to make him look black."
(Evening Standard, March 5 2003)
YOU could hear the editors cheering this week as the Government announced the press should continue to regulate itself. By rejecting calls for Ofcom, the new communications watchdog, to control newspaper content, ministers gave the thumbs-up to continued self-regulation under the Press Complaints Commission. As Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt pledged yesterday, "the free press will remain free".
But just how free should its leading voices - its columnists and cartoonists, in particular - be to publish offensive or divisive material? The main constraints on unfettered opinion have traditionally been the libel laws and, occasionally, a paper's commercial imperative to maintain circulation. Yet two controversial recent cases have prompted intense debate about where the limits should lie.
Last week, Scotland Yard said it was investigating an allegedly racist column by Taki in The Spectator that blamed the New Year's Day shootings in Birmingham on "black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs".
Taki accused Britain's West Indian community of "multiply[ing] like flies". Peter Herbert, a lawyer who complained about the 11 January column, says he subsequently received death threats and 40 abusive emails after his objections were reported. He now wants Boris Johnson, The Spectator's editor and Tory MP, to be prosecuted "for aiding and abetting incitement of racist hate material".
Over at The Independent, cartoonist Dave Brown has been receiving abusive mail of his own, owing to a depiction of Israel's Prime Minister that was printed on 27 January. The cartoon, based on Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children, shows Ariel Sharon appealing to voters by biting into the flesh of a Palestinian baby.
According to an email campaign led by the New Jersey-based lobbying group HonestReporting.com, the cartoon resembles "something out of Der Sturmer", the propaganda sheet from the Nazi era in Germany. The Israeli Embassy in London, among dozens of complainants to the PCC, argues that such an "anti-Semitic" cartoon perpetuates the medieval "blood libel" that Jews murder gentile children for their blood.
Brown denies that he had any anti-Semitic intent, and considers the blood libel to be so "ludicrously untrue" as to make such an allegation against him laughable. "I think a lot of the people who were offended wanted to be offended, for their own political reasons," he says. "It's quite obvious the Israeli Embassy contacted various Jewish groups, and complaints got passed around on the web." The Independent's editor, Simon Kelner, insists that, as a Jew himself, he "would be sensitive to anything anti-Semitic". He defends the "powerful" cartoon as anti-Sharon, but certainly not anti-Semitic.
Nonsense, responds Anthony Julius, the lawyer who successfully defended Deborah Lipstadt against David Irving's libel claim, and who is now pushing for a PCC adjudication against the Independent. "It is anti-Semitic, in a fantastically irresponsible way, at a particularly volatile time." The Taki column, by contrast, leaves far less room for misinterpretation. Its assertions - that, for instance, "the Rivers of Blood speech by Enoch Powell in the Sixties was prophetic as well as true" - are clearly targeted at a particular ethnic group, and as such, Peter Herbert believes, breach section 19 of the Public Order Act, 1986.
Boris Johnson has called the column "a terrible thing" that "should never have gone in", but shows no sign of ending Taki's arrangement - although he has declined to say whether the columnist will continue as a fixture.
Even the proprietor, Lord Black, has publicly taken issue with Taki's acknowledged "soi-disant anti-Semitism" in the past, denouncing a 2001 column for "lies worthy of Goebbels". Yet at the time, Lord Black was wary of censoring his columnist. "Writers, like everyone else, have the right to dislike individuals and whole nationalities and ethnic groups," he wrote.
"They have the right to express their dislike if they do so rationally, are not legally defamatory, and if they are within the bounds of civilised taste." To censor him "would be to accept a muzzle on freedom of expression".
THIS time, commentators wonder if Lord Black will be quite so tolerant. "Yes, Taki's entitled to free speech, but he's not entitled to break the law," says Bill Hagerty, editor of the British Journalism Review. "Somebody at The Spectator made a mistake." Peter Wilby, editor of the New Statesman, says he would not have printed the column. "We all read Taki because he's so outrageous, but you simply should not be using a mainstream publication to say 'they breed like flies'. Though attracting attention does get you more readers - that's why editors sail close to the wind." On occasion, Wilby has sailed a little too close: last year he apologised for a New Statesman cover alleging "a kosher conspiracy" - an honest mistake, he says now, caused by a failure to appreciate the Jewish community's historic sensitivities.
Few editors believe columnists should be sacked for their views.
Francis Wheen believes that newspapers would be "jolly dull" without provocative columnists, even though he dismisses Taki as a "Caliban with a computer who has nothing to say".
Anthony Julius, for all his concerns about " hate speech", believes free speech (within the law) rather than censorship is the way forward.
That may bring a columnist in conflict with his or her title - as was shown vividly last month when an Evening Standard editorial empathised with readers "who were rightly offended" by an AN Wilson column on Israel. The newspaper "fundamentally disagrees with the opinions expressed by Mr Wilson, but as with all its columnists, allows him freedom of expression".
Peter Hill, editor of The Daily Star, thinks there are too many commentators who are "too righton and miss the point". Better to go over the top occasionally than be bland," he says.
Martin Rowson was once asked to draw Alan Yentob for The Independent's magazine, but his caricature's "enormously long nose" was repeatedly rejected as potentially anti-Semitic. "I'm afraid it did look like a hideous caricature from Der Sturmer - but that's what Yentob looks like," Rowson admits.
"I ended up drawing him with no nose at all. The next week it was Frank Bruno. I said I'd try not to make him look black."
(Evening Standard, March 5 2003)
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