Over on his fine comics news weblog, my friend Tom Spurgeon says that he fears we're about to see a lot of political/editorial cartoonists operating in a climate of fear. Here…I'll quote Tom's key sentence…
…with the newspaper business being what it is and more and more eyes at all levels of journalism on the bottom line, I don't see where any real resistance is going to come from if a set of complaints against a single work or editorialist were to build critical momentum.
I think Tom's right and wrong but mostly right. Once upon a time, the press in this country believed that the news was the news, and you report it as per established rules, regardless of whether it's what your readers want to hear. Now, more and more, people seem to want their news to reinforce what they already believe and to be free of facts or opinions to the contrary. More and more in this Rupert Murdoch world of ours, some news organizations are happy to pander to that need, while others increasingly fear offending anyone…even tiny groups if they're vocal enough. Which is bad news for this generation's Herblocks. You can't be much of a political cartoonist if you offend no one. It's not difficult to imagine editors or publishers folding if a small band of The Offended all make enough noise at the same time about some artist. With the F.C.C. doling out "indecency" fines based on a handful (as in, "less than five") complaints and advertisers sidestepping controversies every which way, it doesn't take a lot of bodies to form an angry mob.
The one area where I might part company with Tom — and I'm not sure if we agree or disagree on this — is that I think the free market should operate in this area. I don't think editors should be quick to drop cartoonists, and they especially should not do so in response to these little ginned-up, phony enraged protests. But it's also possible for a cartoonist to offend to no good purpose and/or spread disinformation, and those folks shouldn't be able to claim the First Amendment as immunity from getting replaced by someone better. It's not as bad with editorial cartoonists but lately, we've seen some incredibly shoddy "journalism" practiced by non-cartooning political commentators (Example: The thankfully-retiring William Safire). A few have even meekly advanced the argument that if something is clearly an opinion column, normal standards of factual accuracy do not apply.
I guess what I'm getting at here is that I think there are some lousy editorial cartoonists out there. I'm not sure the folks who control today's news media know how to differentiate between dropping one because he's ticking off readers who can't cope with alternate viewpoints…and one who's just plain uninformed or unfunny. Tom's right that there's a clear and present danger that the good ones will get dumped or pressured to tone it down. But there's also a danger that the standards for political cartooning will continue to descend, right along with the rest of most editorial pages.