BBC denies that its new religion guidelines will change coverage.

by Mike Riggs
October 19, 2010

https://www.legal-project.org/832/bbc-denies-that-its-new-religion-guidelines-will

Excerpt:

The Washington Post found itself in a tight spot last week when one of the paper's editors canned a comic strip for fear of inciting Muslim backlash. In defending his decision to keep "Non Sequitor" out of that week's Style section, editor Ned Martel told Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander that the strip "seemed a deliberate provocation without a clear message," and, "the point of the joke was not immediately clear."

The joke: Cartoonist "Wiley" had drawn a colorful park scene and captioned it, "Picture book title voted least likely to ever find a publisher…'Where's Muhammad?'"

According to the Washington Post's Comic Riffs blog, Martel concluded "that readers might think that Muhammad was somewhere in the drawing."

The decision sent ripples of indignation through the newspapering community and earned a stern rebuke from Wiley. "All I can do is surmise that the irony of their being afraid to run a cartoon that satirizes media's knee-jerk reaction to anything involving Islam bounced right off their foreheads. So what they've actually accomplished is, sadly, [to] validate the point," the cartoonist told the Comic Riffs blog.

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