National Journal • Aug. 9, 2003
The Media • Craig Colgan
It turns out that Herb Block was loaded. To the tune of about $50 million, at least. Who knew?
Endowed with proceeds from the late Washington Post cartoonist's estate, the Herb Block Foundation announced earlier this year that it plans to award grants and scholarships to needy students, and it has donated to the Library of Congress 14,000 works by the four-time Pulitzer Prize winner.
This pleasant nugget, however, would not qualify for even the top 10 in the list of this year's stories involving American political cartoonists. For some reason, 2003 has become the Year of Perpetual Political Cartoonist Controversies.
Let's review.
First, on at least three occasions recently, members of Congress have decided to offer their services as thoughtful cartoon critics.
In May, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune declaring that he was "astonished, sickened, and infuriated" by a cartoon the paper ran by Pulitzer Prize winner Dick Locher. The cartoon showed a kneeling President Bush paving a bridge between Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat with U.S. dollars, and an obviously pleased Sharon announcing:
"On second thought, the pathway to peace is looking a bit brighter." Jewish groups and others objected not only to the cartoon's point of view but also to Locher's drawing Sharon with what they characterized as a "hooked nose." The cartoon was anti-Semitic and an "offense," wrote a Chicago Jewish leader in a letter to the Tribune.
On the flip side of the Israeli-Palestine issue, Rep. Albert Wynn, D-Md., stuck his nose briefly into the uproar over a cartoon by Daniel J. Friedman in The Diamondback, the student newspaper of the University of Maryland (College Park), which is in Wynn's district. The cartoonist had penned a panel critical of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old peace activist from Olympia, Wash., who was run over and killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in the Gaza Strip while trying to block the dozer from leveling a house belonging to a Palestinian physician. The cartoonist pictured Corrie in front of the bulldozer with a mock dictionary citation underneath her reading, "Stupidity: Sitting in front of a bulldozer to protect a gang of terrorists." The cartoon prompted a student sit-in. Wynn offered a mild lecture to The Diamondback that the paper "has a responsibility to act responsibly."
Then in July, Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, sided with a cartoonist, demanding an apology from the U.S. Secret Service after it sent an agent to the Los Angeles Times for a "routine inquiry" after the paper published a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez showing a figure pointing a gun at President Bush. The paper's attorney interceded and did not allow the agent to speak to Ramirez. The incident prompted wags in the media to ask: If the administration is going to hassle a cartoonist, can't it at least go find one who regularly opposes Bush? Ramirez often draws cartoons that support the administration.
A string of congressmen showing up in mini-controversies over editorial cartoons may not indicate a trend. But something is up. Issues-oriented cartoons are drawing increasingly passionate responses from readers. And in some cases, the cartoons are helping to attract new, younger fans to the editorial pages, or funny pages, even as newspaper cartoonists themselves say their numbers are shrinking and their incomes are not keeping up with the increased exposure.
One factor is the Internet. After cartoons first appear, or not, in a local daily paper, they often get a second life in the virtual world. Take the case of a recently pulled cartoon drawn by Mike Luckovich, yet another Pulitzer Prize winner, who is based at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and is syndicated in 150 papers. Luckovich drew a panel that showed Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue standing next to a large flag bearing the words "I'm With Stupid," and a hand pointing at Perdue. The caption reads, "A flag Georgians of all races could unite around," a reference to continual conflict in the Peach State over Confederate symbolism in the state flag.
Luckovich's editor, Cynthia Tucker, decided to pull the cartoon after initially telling Luckovich to go ahead with it. Upon reconsideration, Tucker felt that the governor was still too new to the job to go after him, Luckovich said in an interview. But the cartoon had already made it to the newspaper's Web site, where it quickly garnered attention in the few hours it was up.
"The Internet has speeded up everything," Luckovich said. "I like that. I like getting feedback, good or bad, and having people pay attention. More people ended up seeing that cartoon than otherwise would have." Luckovich stressed that though he disagreed with the call to pull the Perdue cartoon, he works well with Tucker.
"The Internet has meant that most of us now have larger audiences, but not necessarily much bigger incomes," said Larry Wright, longtime political cartoonist at The Detroit News and associate creative director of the paper's Web site, detnews.com. Wright says that Internet cartoons still depend on print. "More people see my cartoons on the News Web site than see them in print, but without the credibility of The News behind them, I am not sure anybody would go there to see them."
The Internet also gives larger voice to cartoon critics. Chris Schroen, a 32-year-old information technology contractor here in Washington, posts on his modest personal Web site his critiques of Mallard Fillmore, a strip by Bruce Tinsley that stars a very politically conservative duck, flapping frequently in more than 400 newspapers.
"Mallard Fillmore just manages to irritate me regularly," Schroen said in an interview. "I thought, why not write about it?" Included at Schroen's site is an e-mail from a fellow Mallard critic writing about a Mallard strip that depicts Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with -- again -- a prominent nose. The reader asks: Does that qualify as a "classic anti-Semitic" portrait?
Schroen replies no, that not even he would say that Mallard stoops to racism, but Schroen nevertheless raps Tinsley for always drawing liberals as "ugly as possible."
Tinsley, in an interview, didn't seem to mind the criticism. "If you only found one site that hates Mallard, you didn't look very hard," Tinsley said. "The Framers obviously intended the First Amendment to protect only flag-burning and naked performance art, not anti-Mallard hate speech," Tinsley said with tongue firmly in cheek.
And just as Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury did during the Nixon years, several new comics-page strips are having reverberations normally reserved for traditional editorial-page cartoons, and they're inspiring angry letters from readers. Two that are gaining fans as well as inspiring more than a few tortured newspaper ombudsman columns are The Boondocks, by Aaron McGruder, syndicated to 250 papers, and La Cucaracha, by Lalo Alcaraz, based at the L.A. Weekly and found in 60 other papers.
La Cucaracha focuses on Latino characters and themes, while The Boondocks features black characters and an African-American sensibility. Alcaraz also draws editorial cartoons syndicated to newspapers such as The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. Individual strips of both The Boondocks and La Cucaracha are pulled regularly, it seems, at least somewhere in the country. Both are edgy, by any definition. But next to Mary Worth and Beetle Bailey, what strip would not be?
"The Boondocks and La Cucaracha represent something that is more than just a racial or demographic shift," said Greg Melvin, who edits both strips for Universal Press Syndicate. "It is a generational shift. The Boondocks is newspapers' first hip-hop comic. Hip-hop fans are of all races. Both of these bring a hip, youthful demographic, a type of reader who will get it. Whatever the race and gender." The Boondocks currently has the higher profile nationally. Its targets are all things Bush, but McGruder also regularly tweaks various black personalities, and his quirkier targets include the BET network. More Boondocks news: Look for the TV show and movie soon.
But as a few new voices are squeezing onto editorial pages, others are being moved out. Part-time cartoonist Kirk Anderson made news in April when he was laid off from Knight Ridder's St. Paul, Minn., Pioneer Press. His departure left the 200,000-circulation newspaper with no staff editorial cartoonist. Fellow employees signed a petition on Anderson's behalf asking for his recall, and readers wrote to the paper in support, all to no avail. "As much as we cartoonists like to think we are the center of the journalism universe, I think this is just a symptom of what is going on with newspapers at large, which are cutting and cutting, and serving the local community less and less," Anderson said in an interview. He continues to freelance, he said.
Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who has written two books on political cartooning, takes a longer, historical view, saying that many of the recent controversies aren't radical departures from past practice.
Hess said that as far as members of Congress sticking their noses into the middle of news media controversies: "What else is new?" But one thing is new, Hess said: newspapers these days issuing grand apologies, as the Chicago Tribune did after the Locher cartoon on Sharon and Arafat. The paper wrote in an editorial, "We failed to recognize that the cartoon conveyed symbols and stereotypes that slur the Jewish people and that are offensive. The editors of this newspaper regret publishing the cartoon."
Karen Hunter, reader representative of The Hartford Courant, even labeled as racist a July 13 cartoon in her own paper, by Courant cartoonist Bob Englehart. The cartoon depicts a black couple speaking to a police officer as bullets fly. The caption reads, "Sure, we could give up the names of known criminals and make the neighborhood safe for children. But then we'd be 'acting white.' " Hunter's follow-up column reveals that editorial cartoonists have more than angry readers to worry about: "To tell you the truth, I heard more disgust over the cartoon in the newsroom than from readers," she wrote.
Part of the reason for these spats over cartoons, Hess suggests, is that there are fewer newspapers today, and each one has to serve a broader audience than before. "When there were 10 papers in Chicago or New York, you had a paper that fit every person's personal ideology," Hess said. "Papers have become fairly homogenized. This is not the golden age of cartoonists."
But cartoonists, and their editors, always have to look out for their readers' changing sensitivities. Newspaper editors nationwide brooded and snorted about whether to run the August 1 Doonesbury strip, in which one character, in a Humvee in Iraq, utters the word "sucking" in referring to the death of a fellow soldier. "It is crude, vulgar, coarse, and inelegant, but not, I think, obscene," wrote Don Wycliff, the Chicago Tribune's apparently busy public editor, who defended the paper's decision to use the "S" word. "Or not any longer."
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©2003 National Journal Group, Inc.
Different headline used in 2003 version
