AP removes images of God-as-terrorist Charlie Hebdo cover

One year ago, the Associated Press was among the outlets that censored certain cartoons of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo after the murderous attacks on its Paris offices. “None of the images distributed by AP showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s been our policy for years that we refrain from moving deliberately provocative images,” said AP spokesman Paul Colford at the time, in a rationale that reflected the (less than courageous) thinking of many prominent U.S. news outlets. Charlie Hebdo had frequently satirized the prophet Muhammad on its pages.

 

Now Charlie Hebdo has come out with an anniversary product that depicts God as a gun-carrying terrorist. “One year on: the killer is still at large,” says a line on the cover as a bearded, God-like figure scurries. The Vatican doesn’t like it, asserting that it doesn’t “acknowledge or … respect believers’ faith in God, regardless of the religion.”

 

The Associated Press doesn’t much care for it, either: “We made a determination that showing a caricature of God in this context was just as offensive as showing a caricature of a prophet and hence decided to not to use the cover image,” said Santiago Lyon, AP’s vice president and director of photography, in a statement to the Erik Wemple Blog.

 

When we pointed out that Mediaite’s Alex Griswold had found an AP-sourced photograph showing the current Charlie Hebdo cover, an AP rep responded: “12 photos have been taken down from AP Images, which is the commercial photo licensing unit of AP. The photos came from two content partners that have a direct feed into AP Images.” Lesson: Once you start censoring, you have to do more censoring to stay consistent.

 

Read More: AP removes images of God-as-terrorist Charlie Hebdo cover – The Washington Post