EU mulls media code after cartoon protests
(Reuters/AP)
Updated: 2006-02-10 06:48

European papers benefit in cartoon uproar

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! That street corner cry of yesteryear is resonating at some European publications that have enjoyed a boom in sales and Web traffic after printing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have stoked outrage across the Islamic world.

Denmark's biggest-circulation broadsheet, Jyllands-Posten, triggered the controversy in September by publishing 12 cartoons of the prophet, including one showing his turban as a bomb. Its weekday circulation of about 154,000 hasn't moved much.

But for newspapers in France and Norway that reprinted the drawings with much international ado, the caricatures have become a profile boost and tonic for lackluster sales.

If there's a lesson, it's an old one: Controversy sells.

Mohamed Bechari, a vice president at the French Council of the Muslim Faith, France's largest Islamic organization, said he thinks French readers are buying up the newspapers out of "curiosity" — not anti-Arab or anti-Muslim feeling.

"Here's some advice to those newspapers today facing ruin, bankruptcy or collapse: All you need do is insult Muslims and Islam, and sales will get hot as blazes," he told The Associated Press at a Paris conference Thursday on promoting dialogue between the West and the Muslim world, convened in response to the furor over the drawings.

Demonstrators in Syria, Lebanon and Iran have attacked Western embassies. Protests and boycotts of Danish goods erupted in numerous Arab and Islamic countries. Three days of riots across Afghanistan left 11 people dead.