NYT Public Editor: Should’ve Shown Hebdo

The public editor of The New York Times realizes what The Daily Beast did a week ago: The Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad have news value. The decision to just describe the cartoons was “of little help to the print readers,” Margaret Sullivan writes, “who—if their only news source was The Times—could have gone through this whole tumultuous week without much sense of what the offending cartoons look like. That does them a disservice.” It appears from Sullivan’s column that Executive Editor Dean Baquet held back out of fear for the safety of Times journalists as well as sensitivity to Muslims.