Despite its high calling, our free press can also be a gutless one — and not just when it comes to words, argues David Wallis, founder of the FeatureWell.com news syndicate and author of the new book excerpted here, Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression.
The book contains nearly 100 editorial cartoons and other works of art that American newspaper editors have refused to publish.
Images of Jesus carrying an electric chair up Calgary hill, a suicidal Christmas elf, Hitler serving as a Nixon adviser during the bombing of Vietnam, a corpulent Statue of Liberty, Bush saying his famous "Bring 'em on" taunt in front of flag-draped coffins and even Pope John Paul II ascending into heaven inside his iconic Popemobile are among these ideas (others appear in these pages) once deemed too hot or too uncomfortable to print.
"Cartoonists are arguably the most incendiary journalists," Wallis explained during a recent telephone interview. "Part of their job brief is to offend, and that makes editors increasingly uncomfortable."
Although he has had plenty of controversial works published, editors felt Bob Englehart, the veteran staff cartoonist at the Hartford Courant, would have touched too raw a nerve by jokingly suggesting that Michael Jackson lead the scandal-tainted Catholic Church.
"Cartoons are almost always killed on taste issues. Every cartoon I've ever had killed was for that reason," he said.
Englehart believes that in trying to capture the widest possible audience, newspapers are also forcing themselves to be at times oversensitive when gauging reader response. But too often, trying not to offend means really, really funny cartoons have to go. Some of the biggest laughs he gets while showing his work around the country are from cartoons that editors wouldn't print, he said.
So, just as it hampers political expression, such internal newsroom censorship often hurts artists whose only mission is to provoke a laugh.
One of them is John Callahan, a syndicated quadriplegic artist who also created the Nickelodeon show Pelswick. Today he is the subject of a new documentary on his life and work titled Touch Me Someplace I Can Feel.
Callahan is known for being politically incorrect, targeting everyone from feminists to Alzheimer's patients. But it was poking fun at Martin Luther King Jr., who he described last week as "one of my heroes," that got him banned from a major American newspaper.
After accidentally printing the cartoon, which was "just something that came to mind," he said, the Miami Herald destroyed and reprinted an entire day's issue before dropping Callahan, who stands by his work but has apologized for hurting any feelings.
The 56-year-old has had other cartoons killed — one with a large female bookstore clerk screaming "This is a feminist bookstore. There is no humor section!" But he has never worried so much as today, especially now that he's started drawing political works.
Recalling a recent cartoon addressing government-sanctioned torture, "For the first time in 20 years, I hesitated to draw something," he said.
Even so-called "alternative" newspapers have been known to kill cartoons, writes Wallis in his book, which contains one axed in 1991 by Minneapolis' City Pages. The image was in relation to reports that local police officers had returned a bleeding and naked gay minority teen to the home he had fled from — Jeffrey Dahmer's — while joking that the incident was a "boyfriend-boyfriend thing" and that they would have to get themselves "deloused." It was of a police car with writing on its doors that read "To Protect Heterosexuals" and "To Serve White People."
The artist, Pete Wagner, believes that while most daily papers operate with different politics from those of alternative weeklies, neither show much conviction in what they're willing to publish. Both, in his experience, are more ready to pull their punches than risk taking a hit to the bottom line.
Wallis, who has written for Slate.com and The New Yorker, and has also published a book Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print, sees yet another inherent hurdle to cartoonists getting some of their more controversial work published.
"Editors are often taught in journalism school to worship at the altar of objectivity. Cartoonists who are objective suck," he said. "Fairness makes for lousy cartoons."
This article appears in Apr 4-10, 2007.