Top Stories

 

Ted Rall, president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, doesn't think Wednesday's New York Post editorial cartoon was penned by a racist. But he does think it was a "misfire," a "cheap form of editorial cartooning" that fails to carry any real commentary or message and is common in major publications today.

The New York Post cartoon attempted to create a punchline out of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package and a homicidal chimp in Connecticut. It depicts a police officer who has just shot a chimp and another saying, "they'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

The Rev. Al Sharpton criticized the cartoon, saying, "Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama and has become synonymous with him, it is not a reach to wonder, are they inferring that a monkey wrote the last bill?"

The Post has defended its work as a parody of a news event, and several observers have noted that Sharpton, having been the target of cartoonist Sean Delonas' pen before, is hardly an impartial judge.

Rall, who is familiar with Delonas' work, said he doesn't believe the cartoonist was saying anything about Obama. "It's about his economic advisers who wrote the stimulus bill, and they're a bunch of white guys."

Yet he also criticized the cartoon because it doesn't have a message. Delonas, he said, was employing a common editorial cartoonist technique of tying together two unrelated stories "and forcing these square pegs into round holes."

Such cartoons are "rarely clever" and "don't mean anything," he said, adding that many of his colleagues admit as much when such work is featured in major publications. "The reason cartoonists do them is because editors always print them, and when you do serious, hard-hitting stuff, it doesn't run."

The technique is a lesser cousin of one that Rall said is quite valuable: connecting two seemingly unrelated stories "and creating a pattern and making people see things in an entirely new way."

Rall believes strongly that editorial cartoonists must do more than merely make fun. His online bio reads, "While some of my colleagues are happy to draw lame jokes about the news of the day, I'm trying to live up to the standard established by Thomas Nast by making people think about issues that affect their lives in new ways."

The flap over this cartoon does illustrate the difficulty editorial cartoonists, who are generally white men in their 50s, have in dealing with race, Rall said. As for African-American cartoonists, "as far as I know, there's only one or two working in the entire country."

As a middle-aged white man, Rall said, "When I sit down and write anything related to race, I think long and hard before I do it."

Especially now that editorial cartoonists are going to be depicting an African-American president, said Kenny Irby, Poynter's visual journalism group leader and diversity program director, there's even more reason to hold them to the same standard as the rest of the content that a news organization produces.

That's where the editing process comes in. Rall said it's standard for editorial cartoonists to show a sketch of their cartoons to an editor. A good cartoonist doesn't always try to push the envelope of what's tasteful or acceptable to his audience, Rall said. At the same time, "the cartoonist's job is not to self-censor. It's the editor's job to rein them in."

"There are times when you have to stop the ball and get other people on board with what's being presented," said Katina Revels, visual task force chair of the National Association of Black Journalists. "Someone who can say, 'I'm not sure if that's the right approach we should take on this.'"

 

Poynter could not reach reach Delonas nor Post Editor-in-Chief Col Allan to discuss their editorial process for cartoons.

Rob Tornoe, who was Politicker.com's editorial cartoonist until he was laid off recently, said he shows his freelance cartoons to several people before publishing them. The key, he said, is knowing your audience and knowing how one is different from another.

"Sometimes you intend one thing, but people read into it in a completely different way," he said in an instant-message interview. "I guess that's the nature of art in general, but ... as a cartoonist all you can do is run your idea by as many people that you trust and see what they think."

"Your ultimate goal, just like a columnist, is to try to get to the truth as you see it."