Richard Cooke Should Be Fired

Then he should be thrown in jail. Chaser behind Leunig stunt

A MEMBER of the satirical team The Chaser (link to their discussion board - NOT very enlightened) has admitted posing as cartoonist Michael Leunig and entering one of his unpublished drawings in an Iranian competition for cartoons of the Holocaust, set up in response to the furore over caricatures of the prophet Muhammad.

Richard Cooke, who writes for the Chaser and works as a freelance journalist for several publishers, including Fairfax, admitted responsibility for the hoax yesterday.

"I said to the other guys, 'Wouldn't this be funny?' but they had no idea I'd do it," he said.

"I was sitting in the Chaser office Friday night brain storming ideas, and I set up [email protected] and emailed a link to the cartoon on the [ABC's] Media Watch website to the competition organisers."

Lets see,

• Reckless endangerment
• Malicious Fraud
• Breach of copyright
• Intellectual property theft
• and a charge of general bastardry should do for a start.

If this idiot wants to stand up in public and say things that endanger his own life and safety, I will support his right to do it and might even admire his courage.

But he chose instead to expose someone else, without their knowledge or consent, to the dangers of a controversy that has already seen a number of people killed, embassies closed, property destroyed, international and cross cultural relations damaged, hatred and anger propagated around the world.

He is not only a dangerous idiot, he is a coward.

Actually, there was one half humorous comment on the discussion board worth repeating.

What Richard Cooke did was hilarious...
but I'm not sure he should have owned up to it (next time, take a lesson from the government : pretend you didn't know)...

Comments

[James]

Leunig was never in any danger although he might have thought so. He has to at least accept some responsibility since he was the cartoonist responsible and had wanted his work to be published in The Age.
As for Richard, it is clear from when he said "wouldn't this be funny?" that he never intended his prank to be anything more than poking fun at the absurdity of the zealous and reactionary response to what were meant to be satirical cartoons.

[EM] They were never meant to satifircal, satire inbvites people to laugh at something because it is inherently overblown, self contradictory or just plain pompuis. But not all cartoons are satirical. Nazi cartoons of fat, predatory Jews were never meant to make people laugh, they were designed to engender hate. That was the problem.

As for Leunig being in dange ror not, you are not in a position to guarantee that and neither was Cooke. Given that the Editor of the Jyllands Posten was, maybe still, in hiding, the possibility of danger was on the cards.

But in the end, the problem is cowardice and perversion of intellectual property. He took someone else's work, put it out of context in a place where it would create genuine hatred and tried to hide behind "its just a joke". He should have been fired.