College paper publishes controversial cartoon

A decision by the University of Illinois student newspaper to print cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad has caused protest from the UI Muslim community and sparked a bitter controversy within the newspaper staff resulting in the temporary suspension of two editors.\nIU experts will offer their views on the controversial subject Tuesday, as several IU departments are sponsoring a panel discussion about the cartoons at 6 p.m. in Woodburn Hall, room 100. Experts from IU and the University of Arizona will be on hand to debate the religious, social, artistic and journalistic significance of the images.\nThe Daily Illini reprinted six cartoons Feb. 9. The images originally ran in a Danish newspaper Sept. 30, 2005, and reprints across Europe have recently sparked violence in the Middle East and caused protest in the greater Muslim world. One cartoon depicts Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Islam forbids drawings of Muhammad and many Muslims consider any such visual representations to be blasphemy.\nThe cartoons ran on the opinions page with a column from Daily Illini Editor in Chief Acton Gorton in which he called the cartoons "bigoted and insensitive to the Muslim faith." Gorton said he decided to run the images because he felt it was important for the public to form their own opinions about them, he wrote in the column.\n"I cannot claim to be a champion of free speech and at the same time restrict it from running its course," he wrote.\nGorton also welcomed comment and letters to the editor about the cartoons.\nBut Muslim leaders at IU and UI said there are other ways to report on the cartoon controversy than to run the images that are so offensive to many Muslims.\n"When you run a story about rape or child pornography, you don't need to run a picture with it to tell the story," said IU Muslim Student Union President and junior Ozair Shariff.\nFor its part, the Indiana Daily Student has no plans to print the cartoons, said IDS Editor in Chief Rick Newkirk.\nMore than 100 people representing 15 campus and community groups at Illinois turned out Tuesday in demonstration of the newspaper's decision to print the cartoons, according to an article in The Daily Illini.\nThe Muslim community was offended by the publication of the cartoons, but was motivated to hold a protest after only a few members of the UI community came out against the images, said Shaz Kaiseruddin, president of the UI Muslim Student Assocation.\n"It was not so much that we are offended, but rather that the printing, as well as the lack of response, was part of a greater problem of Islamophobia in this country," she said.\nBut within the Daily Illini's newsroom, the images have sparked a separate controversy. Tuesday, Daily Illini publisher Mary Cory suspended Gorton and opinion editor Chuck Prochaska for two weeks with pay pending an internal investigation into the decision-making processes the two used before publishing the cartoons.\nThe details remain unclear, but some staffers said Gorton and Prochaska made the decision to run the images without consulting the rest of the editors. Gorton and managing editor Shira Weissman said a copy of the news page with the cartoon was passed around to newsroom editors the night before it was edited.\nGorton said that gave his staff ample opportunity to comment on the decision. Weissman said editors did not feel as though they had enough time to comment on the page and that their input was not solicited by Gorton.\nThe staff made its frustration public Feb. 13 when the rest of the editorial board published an editorial lambasting Gorton for not consulting other staff members. The column attributed the controversy over the cartoons to the "callous bravado of a renegade editor in chief."\nRegardless of the details, IU journalism professor David Boeyink said any decision as weighty as running cartoons that have sparked riots across the world should be done in a collaborative manner.\n"An editor would be wise to include as much of his staff as possible in making a decision like this," he said.