CSotD: Editorial Cartooning 101
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Okay, yet another rant on the topic of cloth-eared editors and the state of cartooning.
Start here: On Sunday, Daryl Cagle posted this cartoon to his Facebook page:
He was immediately hit by a flurry of negative comments (mine among them), more or less along the line of yesterday's CSOTD posting: That the Constitution not only works but matters, and especially so in difficult times.
After absorbing a fair amount of punishment, he said the comments had changed his mind, and he revised the cartoon, posting this new version:
And people (including me) had nice things to say about his change of heart and responsiveness to sincere debate. And, behold, all was well.
Until a few people, including Ted Rall and Ann Telnaes noticed that he had both cartoons on his site available for sale to newspapers, and called him out for offering "whatever you want" cartoons in place of reasoned commentary.
The splatter-factor was wide and you can probably Google and find all sorts of commentary within the cartooning community on this.
Through a fairly gentle posting at the Daily Cartoonist, Cagle responded by saying that he did change his mind, he does feel he was wrong, but that he has a policy of leaving his mistakes on the site out of journalistic integrity.
“I posted them, I should live with my history. So both cartoons are up.
My old cartoons supporting the run up to war in Iraq are still posted,
too — I’m more embarrassed by those.”
The important factor, Gardner notes, is that Cagle didn't post new, oppositional versions of those pro-war cartoons, so the accusation that he's consistently and systematically trying to sell to both markets is not substantiated.
Well … okay. He's not trying. But the fact that he left both versions up suggests he is willing. And, motivation aside, no, you don't change a cartoon after a year or two, or even a month or two. And, no, you don't go back and censor your archives to pretend you never held an opinion you now regret.
But it's not the same thing.
You don't change history, but while you don't try to hide what was published way-back-when, you don't continue to offer it for current use if you are convinced it is fatally flawed.
But Daryl's gonna do what Daryl's gonna do.
What really distressed me in the whole back-and-forth was the number of people — including some apparent journalists — whose response to the accusation of selling competing views by the same artist was "So, what's wrong with that?"
What's wrong with it is that it ain't journalism and it ain't commentary.
When I used to talk to classes about the newspaper, I'd point out that there are both columns and editorial cartoons on the editorial page, and I'd remind the kids that they sometimes have a choice after reading a book: The teacher says they can write a book report about it, or they can draw a poster about it.
And kids who are more comfortable drawing than writing are able to show what they thought about the book that way, because we all have different ways of expressing ourselves.
And so some people who are good at expressing themselves with drawings do editorial cartoons instead of writing columns.
If I can explain this to fifth-graders, why does it zoom over the heads of full-grown, educated, literate adults, including some graduates of journalism school?
The difference between Maureen Dowd and Tom Toles is that she writes and he draws. Ditto with Ann Coulter and Ken Catalino, or Paul Krugman and Kal Kallaugher, or Cal Thomas and Glenn McCoy.
Editors assume some consistency from columnists: They don't expect Maureen Dowd to suddenly go militantly pro-life or for Ann Coulter to announce her support for Bernie Sanders, and to then snap back the other direction the next day.
But they don't understand people who express themselves in graphics rather than text and, as a result, they don't see that a good cartoonist not only has a consistent political outlook but a consistent, coherent voice, that, just as Dowd is a wiseass and Brooks more of a pedant, some cartoonists are also wiseasses while others are more pedantic in their approach.
Nor — and this may be getting closer to the issue — do they sit there trying to decide whether they should run a David Brooks column or "Ask Amy" on the editorial page, on the grounds that both are columns and either would fit the space they're looking to fill.
They can tell the difference between political commentary and light features, but they see no difference between editorial cartoons and the gag strips on the comics page.
Which is why so many of them honestly think editorial cartoons need to be funny.
The other day — speaking of wiseassery — I wrote about my utter inability to process modern dance. And I made light of the form, but I hope I was clear that I recognize that people who do "get it" are seeing something that is apparently there but that I simply can't pick up on. Yes, I have dancelexia.
By contrast, I've encountered far too many editors who don't "get" cartoons but don't even know that they are missing something, and are arrogant enough to assume that, because they don't get anything from cartoons, cartoons are just some fluff that doesn't matter.
So they just pick one and then get on to the important stuff.
The NFL draft is tonight, and, if general managers took the same approach to selecting players that editors take to selecting editorial cartoons, here's what would happen:
1. They wouldn't consult with the defensive line coach or the runningbacks coach on any prospects, because the general manager outranks those guys and therefore knows more than they do.
2. We'd see a draft in which all the choices would be made on the basis of whatever position the GM played in high school.
Fortunately, team owners do not hire general managers who only understand one aspect of the game and who think they're too smart to have to consult with the coaching staff, and competent general managers in the NFL know their strengths and weaknesses and find ways to fill in their gaps.
Which may be why the NFL seems to still be selling a lot of tickets these days while some other industries (no names, please) are struggling.
And now, your two minutes and 44 seconds of zen …
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