An open letter to Richie McCaw

Dear Richie,

You're a great rugby player and I understand the reasons why so many honours have been heaped on your shoulders but I don't accept that they're deserved. I know that those who the conservative world honours almost always share its core values and it was no surprise when an over-excited John Key opened his 2014 election campaign by holding up his mobile phone and crowing – "Richie says, yes you can." 

(We have to assume there was an actual text from you and that it was not unsolicited.)

I’ve no doubt that at times you've found the PM's fawning fanboy attentions a bit embarrassing and tiresome – although not half as embarrassing and tiresome as many in the wider populace have found them –  and that, like many of your fellow citizens, you wish he'd grow some gravitas.  

At times I did wonder if your tacit and overt support of Key was the result of political naivety but any doubts I had on that score were dispelled by your recent decision to use your considerable influence to sway public opinion towards John Key's flag. 

And let's not be disingenuous and try to pretend it's anything other than John Key's flag. 

He wanted a fern; he wanted the flag to be black or at least to have some black on it; he expressed his preference for the black, blue and white Lockwood design; he has been pictured wearing it as a lapel pin whilst on official duties, and he set up the costly two stage referendum to maximise his spin doctors' chances of swaying public opinion, which, let's not forget, initially was overwhelmingly against flag change.

He wants the change and he wants the flag to be remembered as his flag.  And indeed it will.  It is already a symbol of an increasingly divided country so, if adopted, it will be an apt legacy indeed. 

The irony in this is that a lot of those people who are calling for flag change so that we have a flag which distinguishes us from Australia – are the very people who would have screamed foul if a left wing government had staged such an obvious piece of political manipulation.

Can you imagine the outrage from the political right and its media mouthpieces if a left wing government, whilst preaching the need for austerity amongst the affluent, had decided to spend $26 million on a two-stage referendum intended to ensure a particular outcome, i.e. to ask people to choose a design by ranking their preferences from a skewed shortlist of designs – most of which featured the PM's preferred symbol – and then used highly influential people to manipulate public opinion into voting for the 'winning' design?

The spin doctors knew that a straight vote for flag change, especially in advance of any constitutional changes, would result in a resounding NO.  So they set up a process in a which a minority of the electorate would pick one of the fern based designs after which they would put the political machine on maximum spin cycle to try to ensure that design would win over the current flag. 

They knew there'd be a core of people who would follow the PM's lead. They also knew some people who were previously opposed to flag change would start to waver if a lot of celebrities and sports stars like yourself supported the challenger – especially as the Olympics are later this year and perish the thought that someone might mistake a Kiwi medal winner for an Australian.  And they banked on the fact that a lot of people would be disgusted by the whole process or care little either way and they'd not vote at all.

If their calculations prove to be correct, the outcome will be that a small minority of the population will once again have imposed its narrow self interest on the rest of the country.

If this flag change had been part of an overall review of NZ's constitution and a move towards a republic, I could see the logic of it.  If John Key didn't fall over himself to tug his forelock to the Queen and welcome British royal visitors to NZ, and if his government had not reintroduced a British style titular honours system, I might be less inclined to see it as a cynical rebranding exercise and a distraction and diversion from more important issues.

Like it or not, New Zealand history is inextricably tied up with British history. Our legal and our political system are all derived from the British system. On your passport, it is the British Monarch, not the Prime Minster, who asks foreign governments to grant you entry and protection. The relationship between tangata whenua and the British Crown is a defining element of our history, culture and constitutional arrangements. The coat of arms symbolises that relationship, as does the old flag.

The black and blue Lockwood design makes no reference to it.The black is a nod to the All Black brand which has spread its tentacles into all other NZ sports brands and which originally had no symbolic national significance; the giant stylised fern frond is also a nod to sporting as well as other commercial brands; the blue (usefully much closer to the National Party blue than the navy blue of the old flag) is supposed to represent the Pacific Ocean, and only the red stars of the Southern Cross remain unchanged. 

Perhaps if this clunky design does win, when the government then embarks on the next costly exercise – that of changing all the official uses of the current flag (eg. all the insignia which feature the coat of arms) – it could make partial amends by changing the spear in the hands of the Māori warrior to the Tino Rangitiratanga flag. I won't be holding my breath.

In the context of the secret negotiations around the TPP – the signing of which arguably involves the greatest ceding of political and economic sovereignty that independent New Zealand has ever seen – the spiel about the importance of having flag change becomes even more obvious as a piece of political theatre designed to distract and divert people away from way more important issues.  We get to vote on the design of a bit of cloth that is run up a flag pole and which athletes drape themselves in but we don't get to decide on joining the TPP which, if ratified, means our sovereignty has been profoundly compromised.

You're a sportsman and a team captain; you know what it takes to get a group of individual players to work as a team. You should also know what gets in the way of that happening.  

IF it is adopted, the blue and black flag will always be disliked by a great many people in a way and to a degree that the old flag – for all its problematic history and reminders of a colonial past – never was. 

A dehumanising caricature

The piece below was first published in The Press on  Nov 25th 2013.

This morning one of those irritating exhortations to support something popped up on my Facebook page. It asked people to "share or like this if you want to bring back Golliwogs".  The sheer stupidity of it as well as its nasty underlying racist agenda offended me – hence publishing this piece again here. 

I keep seeing Golliwogs – on prominent display in a department store toy section, in my local chemist shop and most recently, in a newspaper article about a country fete.

Golliwogs are seen by some people as offensive, a crude caricature of a black man that emerged in an era when such images served a very real political purpose. Others see them as symbolic of the struggle against a "political correctness" that they think curbs their freedom of speech and choice.

The original Golliwogg was a character in an 1895 British children's book and was based on a blackface minstrel doll that the author, Florence Upton, had played with as a child when her family lived in the United States.

The doll and Upton's drawing are a crude caricature of a black man and, although the original character had a good heart, Upton considered him to be extremely ugly.

The name of her character was taken up by other authors in an era in which most white people were either unaware of racial stereotypes and their ill-effects, or were happy to use them for political and commercial gain. It became a generic term and a racial epithet (like "Sambo"), and is very likely the origin of the racial insult "wog".

The toy and books containing the image became very popular throughout Britain, the US and parts of Britain's empire, but fell out of favour with the rise of civil rights and anti-racist movements.

Racist iconography was extremely useful in the processes of imperialist expansion.

Negative images of people of colour flowed through literature, art, commerce and even science - helping form and maintain the ideology of race which underpinned the political and moral "correctness" of slavery, and which also served to justify the historical fact that a global minority of white people appropriated the lands and labour of a global majority of people of colour.

Britain formed a vast empire on the back of the slave trade but also led in its abolition – in part because so many Britons were revolted by it, but mostly because slavery had become a form of property relations that had largely outlived its usefulness.

After the American Civil War, the abolition of slavery in the Confederate states led to the creation of what became known as the "Jim Crow" laws – the US equivalent of apartheid. (The name came from the song Jump Jim Crow by a white comic actor, Thomas Rice, who had popularised blackface in the 1830s.)

Concomitant with the segregationist laws was the rise of white supremacist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, and the use of terrorist tactics to intimidate black people, force them out of communities, prevent them from voting and from owning land and businesses. No one knows for certain how many African-Americans were lynched in this era but official figures record the lynching of 4743 people (including 150 or so women) between 1888 and 1968.

Seventy-three per cent of the victims were black, and 73 per cent of lynchings occurred in the South. Men were often tortured and women were usually raped before being murdered.

The Jim Crow era also saw mass production of caricatured images of African-Americans. Some of these were seemingly benign, like the dandified "coon", the happy- go-lucky, stupid field hand, the semi-feral "piccaninny"",and the fat "black Mammy"; and some were cruel and grotesque.

A comic stereotype of "mulatto" women as sexually hyperactive had helped legitimise the rape of black women by white men throughout the 1800s. It became more prevalent and extreme during Jim Crow and reduced the likelihood of a black girl or woman accusing a white man of rape, or being believed.

A new stereotype emerged with Jim Crow, that of the black man as an aggressive sexual predator of white women and it was used as a spur for, and legitimation of the shootings, burnings and hangings of black men.

Negative stereotypes and cruel caricatures can dehumanise their subjects and help make it possible for the unspeakably horrible to occur because they desensitise those who create and consume them.

To understand the awful, dehumanising power of negative racial stereotypes, you've only to look at the propaganda caricatures of Jews in Nazi Germany.Those of the Japanese in the United States during World War II were as bad and served a similar purpose.

Google the lynching of Jesse Washington but be warned that, if you are a person of conscience, you will find it disturbing.

The postcards that were made from the photographs of the torture and murder of the 17-year-old, along with other lynchings, are sold on e-Bay, part of a thriving trade in racist memorabilia.

When I've asked people about the sale of golliwogs, the response has been either disbelief that they're on sale or incredulity that anyone would question it.

To some people the golliwog is just a toy and, if they accept that it's a caricature of a black person, they argue it's a harmless one.

But, the "blackface minstrel" doll on which the golliwog is based is part of the same racist iconography as "humorous" postcards like the photograph of four naked black toddlers with the caption "alligator bait".

No-one these days would think it's acceptable to make, sell or buy a toy that caricatured a person with a disability, so how is it acceptable again to make, sell and buy toys that caricature black people?

Bullshit, Inaccuracy, Adulteration and Spin

 When I was still a Twitter neophyte I received a retweet from Tweeter A via Tweeter B:

•        "As Patrick Gower insists on commenting on the stories he is 'reporting' on, he cannot be classed as a journalist, is about facts, not opinion"

I assumed that a person in possession of an opinion about a current issue was in need of a response, so I tweeted back : 

•        "Don't agree actually. Impossible to separate facts from opinion – why a diversity of opinion in MSM is needed"

Tweeter A responded:  

•         "of course it is! if they want to spread their opinions they should start fucking blogs" 

This is the point at which alarm bells should have rung but I'm well known for a dogged pursuit of my point so I replied:

•          "What's defined as fact, how presented & ordered, which included/excluded etc – all guided by opinion." 

By this, I meant that someone's world view, including their politics, must, to some extent, influence how they report a given issue.  Of course a good journalist strives for accuracy, impartiality and balance – that's the essence and life blood of quality journalism – but, if all they do is repeat "facts", they become nothing more than stenographers, "repeaters", "churnalists". In light of who provides most of the FACTS these days (a very small number of corporately owned news agencies and a host of PR companies) that can only serve the interests of the powerful. 

Tweeter A did not agree:

•         "I do not agree with your definition of journalism, I am looking at you very judgmentally ‪#tsk ‪#checkyourself"

Now I didn't know much about Twitter lore at the time so the hashtag thing was uncharted territory for me, and I thought Tweeter B was being ironic. 

Tweeter B fluttered in with:

•         "Strip back The Spin; Expose the facts."

My determined pursuit of logic and rational argument led me further into deep waters:

•         "Have a problem with notion of journos as mere 'repeaters of facts. Has come to fore with neolib economics."

I followed that with the rhetorical question:

•        "Who stocks this storehouse of value-free, politically neutral facts for journos to repeat?"

Tweeter B replied:

•         "Ummm I dunno, things happening?"

I should have pulled the plug at this point but it was one of those "I can't stop, someone on the internet is wrong" moments, so I wrote:

•         "News agencies were primary source for journos – most closed since 1980s. More info now but also more disinfo"

Tweeter B came back:

•         "And their job to distinguish between the two?"

Great, I thought, we've completed the circle :

•        "Yes & that requires them to use judgement, to interpret what are presented as facts."

Tweeter C entered the thread and queried my assertion that it's impossible to separate facts from opinion, and cited science as an example. I asked Tweeter C if s/he was kidding, planning to then elaborate on my belief that science is by no means politically neutral or value free.

Tweeter A chipped in: 

•        "are you kidding?

I responded in the negative and wrote:

•         "Debate was about journalism; science is not inherently value free/politically neutral."

Tweeter A was not amused:

•         "wasn't a debate, you came into my feed giving your view of journalism, you're now done here"

Tweeter C replied to Tweeter A with a well aimed comment: 

•        "If you don't want comment on your feed, talk to yourself in an empty room, don't tweet" 

Tweeter A then spat the dummy :

•        "don't want incessant comment from fuck stains about bollocky bollocks on my feed capeche?" (sic)

Tweeter C replied :

•        "you need to calm down."

I tried to reply to Tweeter A but couldn't as I’d been blocked, so tweeted to the others: 

•        "Someone tell Tweeter A there was a wider debate about journalism I was referring to."

Tweeter A flew back with:

•          "is that a subtweet? can you like just fuck off now? ffs cheers"

I didn't have a clue what a subtweet was or why it was such a bad thing and only realised later that Tweeter A had in fact started the whole thing off with a sub tweet about Patrick Gower. 

Tweeter B then blocked me, presumably in solidarity with Tweeter A. 

Still furious, Tweeter A posted another tweet, seemingly without a hint of irony, sent to me by Tweeter D who was following the exchange: 

•        "subtweeters give me thrush,and make me wish somebody would skull fuck some fucking class and smarts into their rampant stupidity"

Tweeter D continued the debate :

•        "LynnW's point valid - if u don't agree counter it. That's Twitter - capiche."

To which Tweeter A, still under the control of his adrenal glands, replied :

•         "we were not actually talking about that, and lynn makes me vomit blood"

Tweeter B pitched in again, seemingly drawing some sort of parallel between sexual assault and breaches of Twitterquette:

•        "Stop means stop No means no Y do persons consider its OK 2 force themselves on U on Twitter"

Tweeter A then tweeted back to Tweeters B, C and D:

•        "at least preface it with 'sorry to interrupt, but am going to talk about something else" '" 

...which made absolutely no sense because I had been talking about what he'd originally tweeted.

Tweeter B ended the exchange with the somewhat surreal comment:

•         "If it continues I will require lubrication & some kind of Pornography…"

All very daft but also illustrative of some far from silly issues – as well as providing proof that having an overactive amygdala is not the exclusive province of the political right.  

If I write something and someone disagrees with me in a polite and reasoned manner, far from being offended, I'm delighted. I don’t like it if they abuse me or deliberately derail a discussion, but I welcome an intelligent exchange of views.  Only a determined ideologue who brooks no disagreement with their views, or a narcissist who so highly values their own opinion and/or sees "favourites, followers and retweets" as evidence of their personal worth and a flattering mirror they can preen in front of, would be offended by someone politely disagreeing with them. 

I've written about this, not to embarrass the people involved (hence no names) or to purge myself of it (although I found it extremely disturbing to be referred as a "fuck stain" and a thrush-inducing emetic) but because it illustrates the way in which "social" media can be viciously anti-social.  

The back story to that particular exchange was blogger Giovanni Tiso's call for readers to cancel subscriptions to the Sunday Star Times as a protest against that newspaper giving a column to MP Judith Collins. The placement of Collins' debut column made its status as an opinion piece a bit ambiguous and the paper also ran a profile piece alongside it, thus giving Collins the opportunity to start the revision of her old public image as a car crushing, gun toting hard-arse. Her much publicised friendship with a far-right wanna-be hard-arse, plus several other examples of what was widely seen as politically and ethically dubious conduct, had made it expedient to ditch the Crusher persona and create a new one – a softer, more thoughtful, socially sensitive, Judith Collins.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people did not buy into the transmogrification of Ms Collins and questioned the motives and ethics of the SST in giving her a high profile platform from which to relaunch her political career. Tiso wasn't alone in feeling outrage at what was a smack in the mouth for anyone who had any grasp of the anti-democratic nature of the two track dirty politics in which John Key and his government had been immersed. 

Matthew Hooton sparked it off from what I could see, by tweeting that Tiso was acting as a censor, trying to suppress views he didn't like. Several journos flapped in to defend their profession, one even suggested that Tiso's call for people to cancel subscriptions might cost jobs. Others pitched in with references to Labour MPs who had columns in the past. Hooton, very likely emboldened by the growing number of dogs attached to Tiso's ankles, called him "a fascist" – the ultimate insult for a principled left winger – and the whole sorry mess was topped off with an illiberal coating of a certain rightwing blogger's malodorous hate mongering.  

It all got very silly, and as so often happens with this sort of stoush on Twitter, the principle got well and truly buried under a load of nonsense and emotion. It also had the highly desirable effect of making John Key's inability to tell the truth disappear off the radar as a host of news and views dispensers went fluttering off in hot pursuit of the issue of the hour.

Social media are obviously very important; they link people, break down barriers, promote causes. They can also induce and force-feed moral panics, deepen divisions and hostilities, and they can reinforce social isolation and add to people's sense of alienation.  




We humans are a profoundly, inescapably social species. Our drive to connect to others is so strong we try to form meaningful social connections in an increasingly alienated and socially fragmented world via a keyboard and screen. These virtual relationships are not, nor can they ever be, a substitute for interactions between real human beings.  We devote a lot of our big brains to analysing facial expression and body language, and we have developed extraordinarily subtle spoken and written language to convey and develop complex ideas. It's very easy for what one writes on social media to be misinterpreted. Emoticons are a very poor substitute for face to face or carefully written communication, and even that can be misinterpreted.

The pared down sound bite has become the modern norm, both pandering to and reinforcing a reduced span of attention to both the spoken and the written word. The potential for misunderstanding on Twitter is compounded by the restriction on the number of characters plus a host of conventions well known to the Twitterscenti but perhaps not as well understood by others. 

On Facebook, a mob mentality can and frequently does result in an outpouring of emotion – sometimes cloying sentimentality and sometimes vicious bigotry, and it is scary how easily some people slip from the one to the other without missing a beat. 

Given the potential for misinformation, misunderstanding and the absence of normative controls on what is said and written, it's hardly surprising that white-hot emotion on social media is simmering away just below the surface ready to burst out and incinerate anyone in its path.

Social media like Twitter and Facebook seem to give power to the little people but the stream of information is often so polluted by masses of garbage it can be very difficult to see what is true and pure. On Twitter this is made more difficult because the speed with which "items of news slip by" is no longer the slow pace of Ewan MacColl's "flakes of food in a fish tank", it's a fast flowing, ever changing torrent complicated by the appearance of multiple tributaries which makes in-depth analysis and discussion harder, and for a lot of people, nigh on impossible.

In this respect, mainstream media are a vital counterbalance – or should be.  I've read at least one newspaper a day, and mostly 2 or 3, almost since I learned to read. It's distressing to me that most newspapers these days are more white space than print, more colour photos than commentary and more advertising than editorial. TV is mostly a thin, unsatisfying crust of highly paid talking heads mouthing sound bites and platitudes, over an unpalatable filling of freak shows posing as reality TV. Commercial radio heaves with unpleasant schlock jocks whose commentary is so low effort and insulting it's a relief when it's interrupted by the screeching adverts.

We are seeing a merging of paid content and editorial in all the mainstream media. As we move further into the realms of commercial advertising and political spin pretending to be reportage, journalists – as members of a profession whose raison d’être was the pursuit and presentation of the truth through accurate, impartial and balanced reportage – are members of a threatened species.  

Unless the decline is stopped and reversed, what we will be left with are purveyors of BIAS – Bullshit, Inaccuracy, Adulteration and Spin. The relatively few thoughtful and principled authors, journalists and bloggers are all that stands between us and a vast cyberspace littered with toxic trash.

 Not to want to over state it of course. :)

From Kim Thuc to Aylan Kurdi

The latest Charlie Hebdo controversy got me to thinking about Aylan Kurdi again and why it was that a photo of a drowned 3-year-old Syrian boy on a tourist beach in Turkey touched people all over the world in a way that equally heart-breaking images of dead and dying children had failed to do – and no doubt will fail to do in the future.  

It was an especially heart-wrenching image and anyone who was not touched by it at some level must surely lack some essential piece of their humanity.  But we know that around 8 million kids under the age of 5 die every year – that's 15 every minute of every day – mostly of preventable causes.  We know that 4 million of these children die in their first month of life; that there are 2 million kids under 15 who have HIV, and that hundreds of thousands of kids are trafficked every year as sex slaves and sweated labour. 

We know this. Images of and information about the the world's sad little victims flow through our lives like a polluted river.

Given how many victims there are, and how few are ever known or have any real impact on others, what was it about this particular image that touched people in the developed world so widely and so deeply?

Was it because Aylan was dressed just like kids we see in our local shopping centre? Because the sea had not undressed him or abused his body?  Because he was lying as if asleep, his chubby cheek resting lightly on the sand, his little hands palm upwards, his little shoes still on his feet?  Was it because he looked just like what he was – a cute, innocent little kid – and in this shallow, fluffily abstracted world of ours, people have become conditioned to respond to cute? 

This anonymous starving African child was no less singular or important and very probably he was no less loved.  He felt no less pain and fear and misery –  he may have experienced more – but masses of people were not touched by this image in the same way as they were by the image of Aylan. This image never became iconic. 

In this iconic photo, a  9-year-old Vietnamese girl was fleeing from the napalm that was dropped on her village. She was terrified but looked unharmed. The terrible burns on her back were not visible to the camera. The other children were no less terrified but no one bothered to find out who they  were. The photo was cropped to highlight Kim Thuc who was later identified and became an anti-war symbol and eventually, an anti-war activist. 

Of all the photos taken of the horrors of that dreadful war, why was that one so powerful and influential? Of all the photos of dead refugee children, why did the one of Aylan Kurdi touch such a chord?

Perhaps it is because a particular image captures a moment whose time has come, because the influential people in the developed world are at that moment, able – maybe permitted – to relate to the human beings in the image, and importantly, because the conflict that harmed or killed those human beings, has directly touched their lives.  

In 1972, when the photo of Kim Thuc was taken, public opinion in the USA had turned against the Vietnam war and a year later the USA had withdrawn its troops, leaving not just Vietnam but an entire region, socially, economically and environmentally devastated. It is interesting that the wave of public sentiment and outrage that was unleashed by this photo did not propel the anti-war movement into becoming a Reparations for Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia movement.

In 2015, many Syrian refugees – unlike the millions of Palestinian, Iraqi and Libyan refugees before them – have flowed towards Europe. Their choice means Europe's roads are once again thronged with people fleeing war and that image of the three-year-old dead on a beach turned a mass of anonymous humanity into real, suffering people. 

We all knew, before we saw that photo, that kids were suffering and dying as they and their parents fled from conflicts in the Middle East, just as we all know that the millions of victims of this badly managed world of ours are all around us. We all know that, even in the wasteful, overfed, over-housed, over-dressed, self-absorbed developed world, there are people who are malnourished, homeless and destitute. 

For the most part, people who have an unprecedented ability to see the world they live in and to act on what they see, choose to close their eyes, their minds and their hearts to the horrors around them. 

Occasionally something provokes a response that crosses generations, races, religions and class and results in a mass response that seems to defy logic, as if all the heart ache, the frustration, the outrage, the sense of the unfairness of it all are encapsulated in, and summed up by that one moment. Normally feeling powerless in the face of the vast and brutal forces that control the world, people feel connected by a shared, emotional response to one particular victim, and by that connection, they may be motivated to try to do something to help at least some others. And that can only be to the good. 

But it is a strange and unpredictable thing, this outpouring of emotion and sentiment in response to a snapshot of a particular historical moment.

Sentiment alone can take us only so far. It's an unreliable fuel that runs out very quickly and leaves people feeling emotionally stranded somewhere between pity and guilt. Ask those who are fuelled by sentiment alone to address the causes of the world's horrors, and they will have no answers and sometimes not even the will to frame the questions. Ask them to step up and challenge the power structures and ideologies that create and perpetuate the horrors, and few will be motivated enough to take that leap.

Pity is a weak thing if not welded to the desire to make things better.

Guilt is a negative emotion that can be turned back on what causes it.

We only do justice to the victims if, after we have got over our shock and our sadness, we are left even more determined to do whatever it takes to change things for the better. 

On satire and political cartooning

So, is Charlie Hebdo lampooning the sort of rightwing, low effort mindset that would see a drowned toddler as a potential sex attacker?  Did their Boko Haram kidnap victims cartoon satirise the sort of mindset that could only see the young women as potential "benefit bludgers"?

The trouble with these sort of cartoons is they are open to misinterpretation – and some people will not understand the satire and will see them as racist and /or grossly insensitive.  I suspect the CH cartoonists think that is also part of the joke. They intend their cartoons to be lampoons of the sort of right wing, low effort mindset that turns even helpless victims into a threat but the joke is also on the humourless and the literalists who fail to understand the satire.

This Nisbett cartoon, printed in the Christchurch Press, sparked off a row in New Zealand, with a lot of people seeing it as reflecting and reinforcing negative ethnic stereotypes. 

Race Relations Commissioner, Susan Devoy, declared it to be 'tasteless but not racist.' It is not the only one on this theme.

Following the Charlie Hebdo logic, Nisbett could have defended himself by claiming to be lampooning the sort of racist, right wing, low effort thinkers who believe all poor brown people are feckless boozers, smokers and gamblers.  

He was of course doing no such thing. Far too often he turns his cartooning skills on the powerless, and in so doing reinforces harmful, negative stereotypes.  

This is not speaking truth to power. It is shielding the powerful by turning attention on the powerless and exposing them to ridicule and hostility.

What makes me believe the Charlie Hebdo cartoons are not meant to be interpreted as attacks on kidnap victims or drowned toddlers is that the magazine's raison d'être is to speak truth to power.  Unfortunately the way it chooses to speak may be misinterpreted as attacking and stereotyping power's victims.

I'm a simple soul. I like my political cartoons to be unambiguous. They may be subtle and multi-layered, they may be stick figures or superbly executed drawings but the best of them are without guile. 

I don't like the use of ugly caricatures, unless they are of bigots, rich bastards or white hunters, in which case, there's no such thing as "too ugly". 

Bottom line for me is, I get what CH is trying to do but I really don't much like their way of doing it.