How We Kill Editorial Cartoonists
MEDIA RANTS
The
late George Bernard Shaw mused that “assassination is the extreme form of
censorship.” A chilling illustration of that sentiment occurred on January 7th,
when masked gunmen stormed the Paris office of the irreverent newspaper Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 staffers
including prominent editorial cartoonists. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the killings, calling them “revenge for the honor” of the
Prophet Muhammad whose image frequently graced Charlie Hebdo in a manner perceived as blasphemous and offensive by
religious fundamentalists.
Almost
as upsetting as the murder of the Charlie
Hebdo satirists was the disingenuous, self-righteous, and hypocritical posturing
in support of free expression by large numbers of American pundits and
politicians. Listening to these self-serving sermons, you’d think that the
modern United States was a beacon of free speech protection. The sad truth is
that political discourse in the United States operates in a very narrow
left/right spectrum, exemplified most depressingly in the op-ed pages of
establishment newspapers and the Sunday morning news (snooze?) shows on network
television. Biting satire in the Charlie
Hebdo tradition for all practical purposes does not exist here
(commercially driven enterprises like the Daily Show, the Onion, and Saturday
Night Live are extremely mild by comparison), making the proclamation of “Jesuis Charlie” in response to the massacre sound hollow and unbelievable.
Delusional
statements of support for free expression became so over the top that even the
ordinarily vacuous David Brooks of the New
York Times managed to make a good point:
“The
journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now
rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but
let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any
American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30
seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The
administration would have cut financing and shut them down.” As someone who’s
been involved over the years in campus struggles to promote political discourse
not even satirical as much as simply critical of established orthodoxies, I can
identify with Brooks’ statement.
What
about American editorial cartoonists? Terrorists do not kill them, but they
don’t have to: contemporary corporate media business models ensure that edgy
editorial cartoonists will be either (a) out of work, (b) become low paid
freelancers, or (c) compromise their edginess just so as to be able to appear
in large circulation venues. Lee Judge,
the longtime Kansas City Star cartoonist
whose full-time position with the paper was eliminated in 2008, told National Public Radio that “It's pretty hard to find a new job when your resume says you
are a professional smart ass."
Lee
Judge received death threats for a gun control cartoon he penned in 2013,
threats which literally forced him out of his home and should have resulted in
wider distribution for the controversial drawing. But due in part to commercial
pressures, American editors just aren’t that gutsy. Contrast that with Charlie Hebdo; radical American
cartoonist Ted Rall met the murdered cartoonists a few years ago and recallsthat “They were encouraged by their editor to be as aggressive as possible. It’s
a big difference between the way things are done in the United States, where
often editors are trying to rein in the cartoonists. There, they were
encouraged to stretch and be as aggressive as possible.”
[Above: Lee Judge's American Sniper cartoon. The Kansas City Star editorial board said that the responses to the cartoon were "obscene, hateful, crude and sexist, laced with
unprintable obscenities. They included slurs, threats of lynching and of
surprise attacks, wishes for slow painful deaths by cancer, and
not-so-veiled threats to family members."]
Wisconsin
is at the moment not exactly a mecca of full-time editorial cartooning. While
the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel cried
crocodile tears over Charlie Hebdo,
they neglected to mention the 2009 forced buyout of cartoonist Stuart Carlson,
which at the time left Joe Heller of the Green
Bay Press Gazette as the only remaining editorial cartoonist in the state.
At the time the American Journalism Review called Carlson “one of a number of editorial cartoonists who have
been eliminated from newspaper staffs without replacement during major industry
downsizing.”
As
for Joe Heller, his 28 years at Gannett’s Green
Bay Press Gazette ended when he received a pink slip in 2013. Gannett cited
finances as the reason for the layoff even as they were at that very moment
purchasing 20 television stations for over 2 billion dollars.
My
favorite Wisconsin cartoonist, the late Lyle Lahey, was also a Gannett victim.
Lahey spent 38 years raising cartoon hell for the Green Bay News Chronicle, a tenure that ended in 2005 when Gannett
purchased the paper and proceeded to shut it down.
You
wouldn’t know it from reading the mainstream press, but there are lots of
provocative editorial cartoonists working right now. My favorites are those who
operate in the tradition of Thomas Nast, the 19th century “father of
the American cartoon” whose caustic pen brought down the corrupt Tammany Hall
corruption ring in New York City. They include Matt Bors (mattbors.com), Tom
Tomorrow (thismodernworld.com), Ted Rall (rall.com), Jen Sorenson
(jensorensen.com), Matt Wuerker (politico.com/wuerker), Ruben Bolling (gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug),
Joe Sacco (google “Sacco’s response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks”), Lalo
Alcaraz (gocomics.com/laloalcaraz), Stephanie McMillan (stephaniemcmillan.org),
and Wisconsin’s Mike Konopacki (huckkonopackicartoons.com). Matt Bors created “The Nib” (medium.com/the-nib),
a great archive of cutting edge cartoons featuring cartoonists you
(unfortunately) will not see in your local newspaper.
For
more information about the plight of editorial cartoonists globally, visit the
Cartoonists Rights Network International. (cartoonistsrights.org).
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