Mission of cartoonists is still to 'twist a few tails'

OPINION: THERE USED to be a cartoon stuck on my wall drawn by Terry Mosher, who operates as Aislin in the Montreal Gazette. It shows an editor studying a cartoon and saying something along the lines of "This is brilliant. Succinct. Hits the nail on the head. Beautifully drawn. Top class. But we can't run it. It is about Israel."

There are two subjects that cartoonists tackle seemingly at their peril. One is Israel. The other is abortion (Well, I guess there are three now – drawings of Muhammad, but that evokes a response of a totally different dimension).

The response to Israel and abortion, no matter how milquetoast (I’ve always wanted to get that word into an article) the cartoon, is a flurry of letters to the editor. And a salvo of press releases.

Quite often it’s pretty much the same letter, as if they are orchestrated by some central organising committee which distributes the template to eager letter writers. Quite often, bizarrely, letters on both subjects mention the same thing – the Holocaust. “This is the greatest calumny brought upon the Jewish people since the Holocaust” if the subject is Israel. “This is the new Holocaust” if the subject is abortion.

And while this response can be expected in a trickle if the offending drawing appears in a European newspaper, the response becomes a deluge if it is in a North American paper. A friend of mine once got three sackloads of mail after he drew a cartoon about Israel. All from Israeli Americans telling him he knew nothing about Israel. My friend lives on a kibbutz on the Golan Heights.

Thus to Garry Trudeau and Doonesbury, and the controversy over the current storyline on abortion. The treatment this segment has received is indicative of the current malaise in newspapers across the Atlantic. It was censored by some papers, and moved, bizarrely, to the opinion pages by others as if Doonesbury had suddenly, after four decades, become a political strip – don’t want that sort of stuff on the funny pages.

America has a great love of the funny pages but editors are wary of any subversion. One editor quite proudly told me once that he devoted a small portion of each morning to check out the next day’s comic strips for smutty words or unsuitable innuendoes. He would white out any offensive material but still run the strip. Sometimes, he candidly admitted, he totally destroyed the meaning of the thing but ran it nonetheless.

American newspapers, and their editors, with some notable exceptions are not noted for either their bravery or their wisdom, if the truth be told. They feel beholden to the lowest common denominator among their readership as proprietors, especially in these financially suspect times, don’t want to offend for fear of losing readers. In the past this wasn’t so. Well, not so much.

They also, of course, reflect a deeply conservative society with a seemingly renewed devotion to religious dogma, perhaps as a response to the perceived fanaticism of Muslim states. And a strangely uninformed society. It was only last week, for example, that a survey in two southern states, Alabama and Mississippi, showed that almost half of respondents believed still that Barack Obama was a practising Muslim. Rick Santorum won both primaries in those states. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

A couple of decades ago most cities in America and Canada had two or more newspapers. They vied for attention among the populace. One cartoonist was hired by a paper in the northwestern United States because they wanted to stand out from their rival daily and he was hard hitting and controversial. Although quite an enthusiastic Christian (unusual among the godless horde that is cartoonists) he was very fond of using Christian imagery in his cartoons.

Hardly a year went by without someone, something or some issue being graphically crucified in his cartoons. And the paper was happy to publish them. Until the day after the rival paper closed down and they became the only paper in town. Suddenly he was a “radical”, a “blasphemer” and “out of touch with our readership” and soon he was away into semi-retirement and drawing caricatures and greetings cards to pay the bills.

That story has been repeated across the United States in the last decade. Where there were once more than 200 political cartoonists working daily, there are now only about 50. Many have no home newspaper but rely on syndication. This suits the newspapers that can take their service but pick and choose what they will print without having to explain themselves to the resident bolshie cartoonist.

But the decline in the number of American political cartoonists has been matched by the decline in political content in the drawings. The Pulitzer prize for editorial cartooning has been won, in recent years, by some cartoonists who just make jokes about the news and don’t have a political thought in their heads. As Fox News has dumbed down TV news, the newspapers themselves have dumbed down political comment.

In Europe things aren’t quite so bad. The structure of newspapers is different as more papers are national and more papers are identified by their politics and not by their geography. So the decline in political cartooning isn’t as noticeable. We also have a lengthy history of commenting through drawings. Freedom of speech, freedom to draw, is constrained more by the current sad economics of the newspaper industry than by any shift in cultural practices.

Of course if Doonesbury causes a kerfuffle when it covers Texan abortion law, Garry Trudeau can be nothing if not pleased. Most cartoonists actually enjoy the thought that they might be upsetting the odd person through their drawings. Perversely we still see it as our mission to "twist a few tails", as a former editor of The Irish Timeswas fond of saying.

Martyn Turner has been

The Irish Times

political cartoonist since 1976