"Dictators of the right and the left fear the political cartoonist more than they do the atomic bomb," said Art Buchwald.
The late great political satirist was speaking more than rhetorically. Throughout history, the political cartoon has acted as a democracy barometer: When despots rule, cartoonists die.
In the 1970s, during Argentina's "Dirty War," Hector Oesterheld enraged leaders of the military junta that ruled his country by depicting them as space aliens. He and his four daughters disappeared in 1976.
In 1987, unknown assailants murdered Palestinian cartoonist Naji Salim al-Ali on the streets of London. As a kind of tribute to al-Ali, both Yasser Arafat and Israel's Mossad are suspected of ordering the hit. More recently, the Danish cartoonists who created the infamous Mohammed cartoons in 2005 were forced into hiding because of death threats from the likes of Osama bin Laden. Incidents of cartoonists being intimidated, imprisoned and exiled are too numerous to mention.
In America, cartoonists don't face banishment, jail cells or assassinations. Suffering for art here means killed cartoons, not killed cartoonists. Still, just like their colleagues in more repressive parts of the world, our editorial artists frequently struggle with censorship.
And it's not just publishers' cowardice that threatens cartoonists; it's the dicey economics of newspapering itself. Amidst declining readership and concurrent cost-cutting, America's daily newspapers are increasingly coming to view staff cartoonists as an unnecessary expense.
In the early 1980s there were about 200 cartoonists on staff in the U.S. dailies. Today, there are less than 90. At Tampa Bay's two dailies, the total went from three to zero. (The two Suncoast dailies have never employed staff cartoonists.)
Is it just a matter of time before editorial cartoonists go from expendable to extinct?
ADOLF HITLER UNDERSTOOD the power of cartoons. They made him crazy … crazier. Long before World War II, David Low of Britain's Evening Standard routinely depicted Hitler as a dolt, which infuriated the thin-skinned führer so much that the Gestapo put the British cartoonist on a hit list.
The CIA also appreciated the huge influence of little drawings. Declassified documents detailing the 1953 U.S. overthrow of Iran's Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq reveal that something actually called the "CIA Art Group" produced cartoons to turn public opinion against the democratically elected leader.
Meanwhile, over at the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover placed Alfred E. Neuman under surveillance. According to Britain's Independent newspaper, after a 1957 spoof in Mad mocked Hoover, two FBI agents turned up at the magazine's office to "insist that there be no repetition of such misuse of the Director's name." More than a decade later, in the Summer of Love, Hoover proposed commissioning cartoons in a memo titled "Disruption of the New Left."
"Consider the use of cartoons," he wrote. "Ridicule is one of the most potent weapons which we can use."
Of course, it's not as if the U.S. government has ever been as controlling of what we see (or don't see) as, say, the Soviets. Here, newspapers and magazines do most of the censoring themselves. Work deemed controversial, sacrilegious, risqué, politically incorrect or simply bad for business gets killed before publication.
It merits mention that understandable motives can drive editors to kill. The world changes so fast that a political cartoon drawn today can become dated tomorrow, and sometimes a promising idea just doesn't work on paper. Editors also keep their creative types from breaking libel laws, flouting industry ethics and gratuitously offending people. Insult should be a byproduct of a reasoned argument rather than a goal in itself.
Too often, though, editors fail to make that critical distinction. They squelch compelling cartoons out of fear — fear of angering advertisers, the publisher's golf partners, the publisher's wife, the local police chief or the president of the United States, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, homophobes, gays, pro-choice advocates and anti-abortion protesters, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Midwest grannies — especially Midwest grannies. They even fear getting noticed. Cartoonist Milt Priggee remembers what an editor told him soon after he joined the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash.: "If you want to survive at this paper, you've got to stay under management's radar. Don't do anything good. Don't do anything bad."
Internal politics dooms many compelling cartoons. Consider Kirk Anderson's 2002 cartoon on the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, which portrays a Vatican "fireman" rescuing a priest from a burning church while ignoring a screaming child trapped in the flames. Anderson's paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, had irked the local diocese for several years. But it repaired relations with the church after publishing an essay by the city's new archbishop. Anderson, who was later downsized, believes his editor spiked his cartoon rather than risk "rocking the boat," even though that is arguably the cartoonist's job brief.
ADMITTEDLY, RELIGION AND cartoons can make a volatile cocktail. In 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten unleashed an unimaginable fury by publishing 12 cartoons featuring the prophet Mohammed. Fleming Rose, the editor who conceived the project, intended to bring attention to increasing intimidation of the free press by Islamic extremists. He never imagined what would follow.
The Mohammed cartoons sparked riots that caused more than 100 deaths worldwide. Mobs torched the Danish embassies in Lebanon and Syria. Protesters in Nigeria destroyed more than a dozen churches. Palestinian gunmen chased Danish aid workers from Gaza. Saudis boycotted Danish cheese. Even Iranian bakers registered their anger, renaming the sticky Danish pastry the "Rose of the Prophet Mohammed."
The so-called "intoonfadah" caused much of the American media to soften its coverage of Islamic extremism. Several cartoons about the riots — that in no way depicted Mohammed — were nevertheless killed. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, for instance, eighty-sixed a Randy Bish cartoon, which showed a turbaned extremist fuming to a TV crew "I was offended by the cartoon." In the background, a movie theater showing Bambi burns in flames.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Doug Marlette likens cartoonists to "canaries in the coal mine." Once mob rule silences cartoonists, who's next?
"Those who have attacked my work," Marlette told Jyllands-Posten, "whether … Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or Muslim, all experience comic or satirical irreverence as hostility and hate, when all it is, really, is irreverence. Ink on paper is only a thought, an idea. Such people fear ideas. Those who mistake themselves for the God they claim to worship tend to mistake irreverence for blasphemy."
Marlette speaks from bitter experience. During his tenure at the Tallahassee Democrat, he endured the wrath of Muslim extremists for a 2002 cartoon, which was posted, then pulled from the paper's website and never published in its print edition. Marlette posed the question "What would Mohammed Drive?" beneath a rendering of a man in an Arab headdress at the wheel of a Ryder truck laden with a nuclear bomb. Besides 9-11, the cartoon alluded to Timothy McVeigh's use of a rented Ryder truck in the 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building as well as the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign by anti-SUV environmentalists.
As Marlette later put it, "the Shiite hit the fan."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) urged its members to e-mail the paper, which was flooded by more than 20,000 complaints. Marlette himself received viruses intended to crash his personal computer and many threats such as, "I will cut off your fingers and put them in your mother's ass."
The response to the Mohammed cartoons has, thus far, been sometimes ugly, often loud, rarely enlightening. One somewhat hopeful sign: A group of prominent French Muslims recently sued a satiric magazine that reprinted the Danish cartoons for "publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion." While the Muslim activists just lost their case, as they should have, a court of law is surely a better place to battle about ideas than the streets. Of course, in a society that truly cherishes a free press, a more appropriate action than a lawsuit would have been a letter to the editor.
NOT THAT EDITORS love to get letters. Though the Internet provides cartoonists with a way to distribute censored cartoons, it also makes it easy for activists like CAIR to register protests out of all proportion to their numbers.
Perhaps the specter of full in-boxes factored into the St. Petersburg Times' decision in 1994 to spike then-staff cartoonist Clay Bennett's suggestive, but in no way obscene, send-up of Bill Clinton's sexual escapades. Bennett clad the horndog-in-chief in a "I'm with stupid" T-shirt — only with the arrow pointing down toward his dick. Spanking the President for his illicit affairs was fair game to Bennett, given that the details of Paula Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton were widely reported. "Her charges seemed in character with Clinton's, you know, psychosis," says Bennett, who typically defers to editors on matters of taste and saves his protests for attempts to suppress his politics.
The fear of reader complaints undoubtedly prompted the Los Angeles Times to quash the legendary Paul Conrad's 1999 cartoon of an angry elephant mounting a startled donkey to symbolize the reality of "congressional bipartisanship." To slip the Wild Kingdom humping past his paper's decency patrol, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner omitted any hint of genitalia. His editor, who called it "thigh-slapping fun" in an interview with a local alternative weekly, killed it anyway. In doing so, the prudish paper deprived readers of a vintage Conrad throttling of Republicans, who were bellowing about bipartisanship while impeaching Clinton over a sex scandal.
Also instructive is the 2004 decision by the clients of Continental Features, a consortium that produces a Sunday comics section for a few dozen U.S. newspapers, to drop Doonesbury. The company's president, Van Wilkerson, asked clients to vote on whether to keep or cancel the controversial strip. In a letter before the ballot, Wilkerson made his position quite clear: "I have fielded numerous complaints about Doonesbury," he wrote "and feel it is time to drop this feature and add another in its place." Papers voted 21 to 15 to replace Garry Trudeau's award-winning strip with Get Fuzzy, which chronicles the misadventures of an advertising executive and his pets Bucky Katt and Satchel Pooch.
Those who consider journalism like any other business will cast dumping Doonesbury or killing a cartoon to prevent canceled subscriptions as no-brainer marketing decisions. Find out what clients want and give it to them. Such one-track thinking — which ignores journalism's constitutionally sanctioned public service mission — explains in part why so many cartoonists are now losing their jobs.
Since 1975, more than two-thirds of America's independent newspapers have been swept away in a tidal wave of media consolidation. The result? Large publicly-held chains beholden to Wall Street now dominate much of the newspaper industry. Despite complaints from publishers about tough times, Gannett raked in 1.16 billion dollars in 2006. Even the supposedly struggling Tribune Company, whose flagship Chicago Tribune once employed three staff cartoonists and now has none, earned $587.69 million last year.
Newspapers typically enjoy profit margins of about 20 percent. That's nearly double what most large U.S. firms make. But stockholders demand constant growth, so, despite margins that would make manufacturers salivate, the bean-counters gut editorial staffs — a book section here, a Sunday magazine there, cartoonists everywhere.
The industry-wide bloodletting inspired "Black Ink Monday," a coordinated protest on Dec. 12, 2005 by nearly 100 editorial artists. Unfortunately, Black Ink Monday did not get all that much ink. Typical was the decision by The Tampa Tribune not to run Paul Combs' cartoon about the plight of cartoonists. The cartoon depicted a wild-eyed newspaper executive amputating his own right hand with scissors labeled "Budget Cuts." The caption read: "There! That should stop the bleeding."
THE SILENCING OF editorial artists — historically a progressive voice in the press — comes at a time when the American media bends over backward — or just bends over — to appease conservatives. "Cartoonists can't do anything," laments former Boston Globe cartoonist (and current Largo, Fla., resident) Paul Szep, comparing recent years with the Vietnam era when he made his name. "I've given up on the heavy-duty stuff. I can't get things printed on a regular basis."
In North Carolina, a daily newspaper told its cartoonist that he could dissent from the paper's conservative policies only on Sundays. That once-a-week autonomy did not last long; the cartoonist was soon fired. In Pennsylvania, a paper punished its liberal cartoonist by ordering a moratorium on Bush cartoons. The cartoonist was soon out of a job.
Other cartoonists know they must pull their punches when covering the Bush administration.
J.D. Crowe of the Mobile Register, a conservative paper in Alabama — or what Crowe calls "the Bush Belt" — admits he treads carefully when taking on the White House and its cronies. "Any time I do a cartoon that questions the administration … it's almost [viewed] like blasphemy," said Crowe. In 2003, amid the BALCO revelations, Crowe pitched a cartoon representing Halliburton as a bulked-up baseball player shooting up from a syringe labeled "no-bid government contracts." Crowe's jab at Dick Cheney's former employer proved too sharp for the Register.
When war flares, the media tends to cover the military (and even its contractors) with extreme caution. "And it stays that way for a good long time," says political cartoonist and illustrator Steve Brodner," until there's such overwhelming evidence … that the war was a mistake and based on lies. Then people can start to really be critical."
Mike Luckovich, the cartoonist at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, had to wait awhile to truly express doubts about the Bush administration's honesty. In 2003, he was prevented from publishing a sketch, spelling out "W LIED" with military coffins. Luckovich's editor told a trade magazine that she thought "it was too early in the war to lay these deaths firmly at the president's feet."
By 2005, as public support for the war plummeted, Luckovich's paper approved a heart-wrenching cartoon to mark the loss of the 2,000th U.S. soldier in Iraq. Luckovich meticulously hand-wrote the names of every dead soldier to craft the word:
"WHY."
The "Why" cartoon, which helped Luckovich win his second Pulitzer Prize last year, reminds us that, when freed to deploy the potent weapon of ridicule by supportive editors, cartoonists matter. Powerful editorial art reaches out from the pages of newspapers and magazines, and now the screens of the Web, to poke readers in the eyes. Cartoons sting us in a primitive place, forcing us to question our leaders, our neighbors, our values.
Adapted from Killed Cartoons: Casualties From the War on Free Expression (W.W. Norton).
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This article appears in Apr 4-10, 2007.