This is taken from The Guardian:

BBC defends cartoon coverage

by John Plunkett
Monday February 6, 2006

BBC News executives have apologised for any offence they caused by showing the controversial Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad - but said the corporation had stopped short of using "excessively offensive" images.

UK national newspapers decided not to publish the cartoons, which were originally printed in a Danish newspaper and sparked angry protests by Muslims in London, the Middle East and Asia over the weekend.

The corporation used video featuring European newspapers that have published the cartoons on its news bulletins, News 24 and the BBC News website.

"Obviously the BBC does not want to give offence to anyone on either side of this debate," said Peter Horrocks, the BBC's editor of TV News.

"So if people - whichever side of the argument they fall within - have taken offence, I am obviously concerned and I apologise for that.

"In reporting the story, we ourselves had to make a decision about whether we published the pictures in any form and inevitably that's made us part of the controversy.

"[The BBC has] taken the view that still images that focus and linger on the offending cartoons would be excessively offensive so we haven't used those in our television news pieces.

"We've used moving pictures of the newspapers where they've appeared to show people the context in which they've appeared and to give them some flavour of the type of imagery but without focusing closely on them."

The BBC faced criticism from both British Muslims, who said the images were "disrespectful", and from viewers who said not shown enough of the cartoons were shown.

"You cannot report a news subject relating to a visual matter without showing that matter," said Lawrie May, one of the complainants.

"It appears that you are scared of the reaction from Muslims, while you were not concerned about the offending Christians when you screened Jerry Springer - the Opera," said Peter Arnold. "This is a case of double standards."

But Mr Horrocks said it was incorrect to make a direct comparison with the Springer broadcast, which prompted more than 60,000 complaints when it was shown on BBC2 last year.

"The BBC is not the primary publisher of these cartoons so to some extent it's different from Jerry Springer where the BBC was responsible for commissioning the programme," he told the BBC's Newswatch website.

Mr Horrocks denied accusations of censorship by the BBC.

"I think if you compare the BBC's position to the whole of the UK printed press, where there hasn't been any publication whatsoever, we've clearly gone further ...

"But we've taken a decision not to go further than that in order not to gratuitously offend the significant number of Muslims in Britain but also - because we make decisions for our pieces to be broadcast internationally - the very significant numbers of Muslim viewers of BBC World television."