The complaint lodged by Morocco’s Press Council (CNP) for what it perceived as violations committed by both Charlie Hebdo and La Liberation on September 20 to the French Council on Journalistic Ethic and Mediation (CDJM) was promptly dismissed by the latter governing Body.
The CDJM stated that CNP’s complaint regarding the two media outlets did not violate press ethics, and that both situations constituted “editorial choices.”
CNP rejected its French counterpart’s response, which seemingly indicated their position to be that any journalistic work is simply an editorial choice and therefore exempts writers from any semblance of press ethics, and that it enables professionals to escape accountability.
The Council commented on the CDJM president’s reply, indicating that it is not professional to refer to what is promoted in social media as serious journalism.
On September 15, Charlie Hebdo published a caricature that the CNP deemed denigrating to earthquake victims who were and still are in dire need of support–many of them having lost their families and sources of income–among them orphaned children. The CNP called this “an unacceptable act” and claimed that the cartoon violated humanitarian principles of basic decency.
As for La Libération, on Monday Sept. 11, they published a photo on their cover of an alleged female victim of the earthquake, entitled “Aidez nous, nous mourrons en silence” (Help us, we are dying in silence), which the CNP criticized as misleading. They reviewed videos of interviews with the woman and corroborated that what she actually said did not align with the published headline.
The National Council stressed that what the two newspapers have done is a violation of journalistic ethics, based on the charters of honor adopted by the CDJM, namely the Charter of the International Federation of Journalists, the Charter of the National Union of Journalists of France, and the Munich Declaration,” in reference to several of the ethics charters breached by the two newspapers.