Scott Adams has been writing and drawing the Dilbert comic strip for newspapers since April 16, 1989.
The strip about office workplace culture rose to be one of the most popular in America, with millions of fans. At its peak, it appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers. In 1998, Adams won the prestigious National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award, which goes to the outstanding cartoonist of the year. There was even a TV show, which ran briefly from 1999 to 2000 and featured the voices of Daniel Stern, Chris Elliott, Larry Miller and Kathy Griffin.
Now the strip, along with Adams’ reputation, is in shambles after Adams made racist comments last week. Hundreds of newspapers are dropping Dilbert following Adams’ bizarre and disturbing rant on YouTube.
Adams was responding to a poll from the conservative firm Rasmussen Reports that said 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be White.”
As CBS News pointed out, “The Anti-Defamation League says the phrase (It’s OK to be White) was popularized in 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the discussion forum 4chan but then began being used by some white supremacists.”
Adams said, “If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people — according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll — that’s a hate group. I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people, just get the (expletive) away … because there is no fixing this.”
Adams also blamed Black Americans for not “focusing on education” and said, “I’m also really sick of seeing video after video of Black Americans beating up non-Black citizens.”
It didn’t take long for the reaction.
Was Adams a victim of cancel culture? Actually, I would suggest this is consequence culture. That is, if you say or do something stupid or, in this case, incredibly racist and harmful and divisive, you suffer the consequences.
The consequence here is newspapers dropping the comic strip.
The USA Today Network, which runs hundreds of newspapers, pulled the plug on Dilbert, as did The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times.
The Poynter-owned Tampa Bay Times also was among the news outlets dropping the strip. In a column announcing the move to readers, Times executive editor Mark Katches wrote, “Long ago, I was a fan of his satirical take on office life. And I’ll bet some of you still enjoy it and may miss it. But there’s no place in the pages of the Tampa Bay Times for people who behave or think as he does. And we have no desire to financially support anyone who holds these views.”
Who’s left? Who’s still carrying the strip? When reached over the weekend by The Washington Post, Adams responded, “By Monday, around zero.”
In announcing his decision, Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn wrote, “This is not a difficult decision. … This is a decision based on the principles of this news organization and the community we serve. We are not a home for those who espouse racism. We certainly do not want to provide them with financial support.”
John Hiner, the vice president of content for MLive Media Group, which oversees eight Michigan-based publications, wrote, “MLive has zero tolerance for racism. And we certainly will not spend our money supporting purveyors of it.” The San Antonio Express-News called Adams’ remarks “hateful and discriminatory.”
The Los Angeles Times wrote that Adams’ comments were racist and wrote, “Further, in the last nine months The Times has on four occasions printed a rerun of the comic when the new daily strip did not meet our standards.”
As the Los Angeles Times alluded to, this is not the first time Adams has been at the center of controversy. The Washington Post’s Thomas Floyd and Michael Cavna wrote Adams has been “entertaining extreme-right ideologies and conspiracy theories for several years.”
Floyd and Cavna added, “The shift in Adams’s public image was initially intertwined with his praise for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Since then, he has identified himself with increasingly extremist viewpoints.”
In fact, the San Francisco Chronicle dropped Dilbert last October. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief of the Chronicle, was quoted in the Chronicle saying, “His strip went from being hilarious to being hurtful and mean. Very few readers noticed when we killed it and we only had a handful of complaints. We had many more complaints when we stopped other strips.”
Adams complained on his YouTube show over the weekend that he was being canceled and that his comments were taken out of context, but he also went on to say more dumb stuff. He did say a couple of things that were true when he said “most of my income will be gone by next week” and “my reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed.”
He has no one but himself to blame.
Musk weighs in
Meanwhile, leave it to Twitter boss Elon Musk to jump into the controversy and, no surprise, defend Adams’ remarks. At first, he tweeted (then deleted), “What exactly are people complaining about?”
Then Musk tweeted, “The media is racist.” Then he followed up with, “For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians. Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America. Maybe they can try not being racist.”
The Washington Post’s Will Oremus wrote, “The billionaire’s comments continue a pattern of Musk expressing more concern about the ‘free speech’ of people who make racist or anti-Semitic comments than about the comments themselves. Musk’s views on race have been the subject of scrutiny both at Twitter, where he has reinstated far-right accounts, including those of neo-Nazis and others previously banned for hate speech, and at Tesla, which has been the subject of multiple lawsuits alleging a culture of rampant racism and sexual harassment in the workplace.”
One more interesting comment
I found this to be a rather interesting passage from an Eduardo Medina story in The New York Times:
Darrin Bell, the first Black artist to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, said that despite the cancellations of “Dilbert,” Mr. Adams’s remarks showed a growing tolerance in the United States for racist behavior.
“‘Scott Adams is not unique in his disgrace,’ Mr. Bell said. ‘His racism is not even unique among cartoonists.’”
No comment
One of the biggest media stories going on right now is the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems. Yet, you won’t hear anything about it on Fox News’ “MediaBuzz” — currently the only national news show specifically about the media since CNN canceled “Reliable Sources” last August.
As I wrote at the time, it was a shame to see “Reliable Sources” go away because it was, by far, the best show about the media on TV. And “MediaBuzz” is a show that is rarely quoted by media observers and critics. I almost never quote it.
But I will today — not because they are covering a media story, but because they are not. Host Howard Kurtz told viewers he is not allowed to talk about this potentially explosive media story.
Kurtz told viewers on Sunday, “Some of you have been asking why I’m not covering the Dominion voting machines case against Fox involving the unproven claims of election fraud in 2020. It’s absolutely a fair question. I believe I should be covering it. It’s a major media story, given my role here at Fox. The company has decided that as part of the organization being sued, I can’t talk about it or write about it, at least for now. I strongly disagree with that decision. But as an employee, I have to abide by it.”
Most major news outlets — The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, for example — routinely cover stories involving their own news organizations and employees. In fact, “Reliable Sources” often addressed CNN controversies.
It’s disappointing, although not surprising, to see Fox News ordering one of its hosts to lay off a story.
Comment of the day
Actor Bryan Cranston, shown here after winning a Tony Award in 2019. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
“Breaking Bad” actor Bryan Cranston was a guest on “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace” on CNN on Sunday and had this powerful comment about Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again”:
“How did we get to a point where we treated other human beings as slaves and were OK with that? When I see ‘Make America Great Again,’ my comment is, ‘Do you accept that could possibly be construed as a racist remark?’ And most people, a lot of people, go, ‘How could that be racist?’ … I (say), ‘Just ask yourself from an African-American experience, when was it ever great in America for the African-American? When was it great?’ So if you’re making it great again, it’s not including them.”
Media tidbits
- From The New York Times, “Our Photographers in Ukraine on the Images They Can’t Forget.”
- Also in the Times, Benjamin Mullin with “Vice C.E.O.’s Departure Signals Fallen Hopes for Digital Media.”
- My Poynter colleagues, Amaris Castillo and Angela Fu, with “Changes coming to Al Día Dallas cause ire, heartbreak. Leadership insists commitment to audience remains unchanged.”
- The Daily Beast’s William Vaillancourt with “Tulsi Gabbard Shocks Fox News Host by Comparing Biden to Hitler.”
- For NBC News and “Today,” Mary Forrest, wife of NBC News’ Richard Engel, writes an essay about her family in “The week I spent with our son Henry after he died.”
- It looks as if HBO’s brilliant show “Succession” might end after season four, which debuts on March 26. The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead talked with the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, for “The End of ‘Succession’ is Near.”
Hot type
- The Washington Post’s Toluse Olorunnipa, Justine McDaniel and Ian Duncan with “How a small-town train derailment erupted into a culture battle.”
- “CBS Sunday Morning’s” Tracy Smith profiles Ke Huy Quan — the actor first known for playing Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and most recently seen for his Oscar-nominated performance in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
- The Atlantic’s Amanda Wicks with “Where Would SNL Be Without Kenan Thompson?”
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