US Cartooning Tradition in Peril

From The Daily Cartoonist. 

In January, the Washington Post spiked a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize–winning Ann Telnaes that criticized the supplicant attitude displayed by the paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, towards Donald Trump … 

She promptly resigned after the incident, the first time one of her pieces had been rejected over its subject.

For 31 years, KAL contributed his award-winning cartoons to the Baltimore Sun. 

In 2024, David Smith of Sinclair—a frequent KAL target—purchased the paper. Smith himself told Donald Trump in a 2016 meeting, “We’re here to deliver your message.” 

Smith transformed the Sun into yet another forum for that message.

KAL, on the other hand, felt no such obligation to deliver Trump’s message. In December 2024, KAL was called in for a meeting with Smith.

He was told to restrict his satire to local issues or face termination. He refused, and was out at the Sun by the end of June.

Florida cartoonist Bob Whitmore was the victim of spurious claims of antisemitism, the same kind that led to the firing of editor Tony Doris of the Palm Beach Post, and of cartoonist Mr. Fish (real name Dwayne Booth) from his 11-year teaching post at the University of Pennsylvania. 

On July 31, Tampa’s alternative weekly Creative Loafing ran a cartoon by Whitmore showing a starving Gazan child.

After a mere two readers wrote in to complain that Whitmore’s cartoon was antisemitic, he was fired by Creative Loafing’s corporate owners.

Enough readers protested the circumstances of Whitmore’s firing that he was reinstated within a few days.

At a time of widespread corruption, official mendacity and general dirty dealings, it would behoove publishers and artists to aim as many satirical barbs as they can at the powerful. 

Yet the record of the first year of the new presidential administration shows that publishers are, for a variety of reasons, encouraging their artists to approach the president on bended knee.

Hank Kennedy at Fair & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) looks at newspaper publishers cowering in the shadow of the current United States administration, submitting to the wishes of one or two letter writers, and actually obeying in advance.

Smaller newspapers have decided they can do without the controversy brought about by running political cartoons. 

In January, Pennsylvania’s Latrobe Bulletin (1/16/25) ran a syndicated cartoon by Lee Judge showing an upside down American flag flying above the White House.

 

Judge’s cartoons upset enough Bulletin readers that publisher Dave Cuddihy put out a statement announcing that no further political cartoons would run in the paper.

Vermont’s family owned Caledonian Record likewise announced a cessation of all editorial cartoons in August. 

Publisher Todd Smith opined that “syndicated cartoons that can be perceived as partisan” are “a distraction from our core mission.” 

Eliminating the editorial page and syndicated cartoons were described as “keeping with [the paper’s] tradition.”