One of the joys of teaching journalism is that I can count on the news itself to provide made-to-order lesson plans.
Take what happened at the Washington Post last week. Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, presented a draft of a drawing to her editor that depicted four men and a certain cartoon mouse in red shorts and yellow shoes bowing and offering bags of cash to a statue of Donald Trump.
The supplicants were: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and Facebook; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI; Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times; Mickey Mouse (Walt Disney’s alter ego); and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post.
Telnaes’ editor, David Shipley, killed the cartoon. Telnaes resigned.
This may seem like a routine chain-of-command issue that concerns the rest of us not at all. After all, Telnaes was an employee. Shipley was her supervisor. He had every right to spike an Ann Telnaes cartoon.
Except: Editorial cartoonists, especially Washington Post editorial cartoonists, are heirs to a hallowed tradition of editorial independence. It was always understood that cartoonists are commentators and that their opinions are their own and not necessarily those of the organization they work for, or its owners.
Consider a similar situation that unfolded at the Post in 1972. On June 22 of that year, the political cartoonist known as Herblock was walking across the newsroom with his latest creation when he ran into his boss, publisher Katharine Graham.
The cartoon depicted a couple of detectives examining several sets of footprints leading to the White House. One set was labeled “Bugging Case.”
Less than a week earlier, Washington, D.C., cops had caught five men wiretapping Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building. Three days after that, Bob Woodward reported a connection between the burglars and two men who worked for President Nixon. But nobody had yet connected the break-in to Nixon himself. Herblock was going out on a limb, as he often did.
Graham laughed when she saw the cartoon. But then she said, “You’re not going to print that are you?”
He told her he was, in fact, about to deliver the drawing to the production guys who would make it appear in the next day’s paper.
Graham could have stopped him.
She didn’t.
That kind of courage is in short supply nowadays. First, we had Bezos and Soon-Shiong yanking endorsements of Kamala Harris from their editorial pages (I agree that newspapers should get out of the endorsement business while suspecting that Bezos’ and Soon-Shiong’s decisions had less to do with high-minded concerns about journalistic integrity than with a craven desire to stay off Trump’s enemies list).
Then, last month, ABC News handed $15 million to Trump to settle a defamation suit. At issue: Host George Stephanopoulos said Trump was “liable for rape” in the suit brought against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll. The jury had found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, but not for rape.
Stephanopoulos was wrong, but in defamation cases against the news media, being wrong is not enough. There must be malice and intention, which is hard to prove. According to University of Utah law professor RonNell Andersen Jones, ABC’s shying away from a trial suggests that the American press is “exponentially less confident that a given jury will value press freedom, rather than embrace a vilification of it.”
David Shipley denies that axing Telnaes’ cartoon had anything to do with running afoul of his boss, Jeff Bezos. The problem, he told the New York Times, was simply that the Post had just published a column on the same topic.
Sounds fishy to me. Columnists and cartoonists routinely address the same hot topics. The overall impression is that powerful as they are, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al., fear Trump’s even greater power and are bending over backwards (or bowing) to stay on the president-elect’s good side. Rather alarming.
Shipley’s decision backfired spectacularly. Had the Post published the drawing, it would have been seen as feather-ruffling as usual in the editorial cartoon world.
Instead, there’s an uproar.
If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that the incident reminds us of the power of the pen-and-ink drawing. For the Humor in Journalism class I’m teaching starting next week, I’m assigning a book called “Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle Against Censorship.” The book, by Cerian George and Sonny Liew, relates cases from round the world where political cartoonists were harassed, threatened, jailed and beaten for mocking Fearless Leader. Humor, these thin-skinned thugs know, is serious business.
It remains to be seen whether President Trump will suppress the work of journalists he does not like. The alarming thing is that he may not need to if media bigwigs and their minions are willing to do the dirty work for him.
