Why Not Publish These Cartoons?

A story about teenage sex at an area high school was heavily edited by a top editor who thought it contained too much sexual detail. And while The Post published the "F" word because Vice President Cheney said it to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on the Senate floor, such words are seldom published.

Brian Jackson of Burtonsville said of the Danish cartoons, "Why would your paper not print them? I would assume it is because they were politically incorrect, or considered offensive. Yet, you offend people all the time with your cartoons. Most recently, you offended, I'm sure, many vets and wounded soldiers with Tom Toles's tasteless cartoon."

The Jan. 29 Toles cartoon, critical of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, showed a quadruple amputee in a hospital bed; it brought a flood of protests, including a letter signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Toles's cartoons appear on the editorial page, which is overseen by Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt. Toles is a Post employee who has a great deal of freedom in choosing what to draw. Hiatt chose to run the cartoon, which Toles and Hiatt saw as critical of Rumsfeld, not of wounded soldiers.

Hiatt also could have chosen to run the cartoons depicting Muhammad. Downie oversees the news pages. And the wall of separation between editorial and news is high, very high.

But Hiatt said he would have made the same decision. "I would not have chosen to publish them, given that they were designed to provoke and did not, in my opinion, add much to any important debate. Should our calculation change once the story becomes big, because the cartoons are suddenly 'newsworthy'? If it was essential to see them in order to understand the story, then maybe. But in this case, the dispute isn't really about what the cartoons look like . . . it's about the fact that he was depicted at all. The cartoons were easily explainable in words. Why reprint something you know will offend many of your readers?"

At least two newspapers -- the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Austin American-Statesman -- have published one of the cartoons. Rich Oppel, the American-Statesman's editor, said, "We didn't put it out on the front page, and it was a way of responding to reader interest without rubbing it in the nose of people who take offense." Oppel said there was very little reader reaction. About 25 people picketed the Inquirer, but the paper "received hundreds of e-mails, mostly in support, and the rest were articulate and respectful," said Anne Gordon, the Inquirer's managing editor.

Being a First Amendment freak, I support those newspapers' right to publish the cartoons. Downie made a different and equally valid decision not to publish.

Deborah Howell can be reached at 202-334-7582 or atombudsman@washpost.com.