of the departing chairman of the BBC, Richard Sharp, was a serious misjudgement. It undermines its credibility as combating all forms of discrimination.with a stereotypical big nose and drooping eyelids. It showed him sneering and grasping a box marked “Gold Sac”, a reference to his old employer, the Jewish-founded investment bank Goldman Sachs.
The octopus and puppet master are antisemitic tropes alluding to a mythical Jewish power network holding the world in its tentacles. The cartoon’s publication caused an outcry. The editor, Katharine Viner, who was working in America and had not approved the cartoon, was horrified when she viewed it. “As soon as I saw the cartoon, I immediately removed it from our digital platforms andapologised unreservedly to Richard Sharp and to the Jewish community,” she told staff in an email.
Rowson apologised on his website. “Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa,” he wrote. “Stupid ambiguities” had been misconstrued. “His Jewishness never crossed my mind,” he said of Sharp .