No Laughing Matter? Part 2
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What happens to satire when press freedom shrinks?
Why has satire increasingly become something institutions fear rather than defend?
Those are questions Daniel Warner at CounterPunch asks as he notes that the United States has fallen to its lowest score on Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.
Major U.S. media institutions are scaling back or restricting editorial cartoons, from the New York Times terminating its years-long contract with cartoonist Patrick Chappatte in 2019 to The Washington Post facing the 2025 resignation of Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes after her cartoon was not published.
Now the pressure on satire is moving beyond newsrooms into U.S. government policy. A March 9 Pentagon memo stated that Stars and Stripes, the soldiers’ newspaper, would no longer be permitted to publish “comic strips and editorial cartoons from commercial news media sources.” According to a January Pentagon plan announced by spokesperson Sean Parnell, the newspaper was to eliminate what he called “woke distractions that siphon morale.”
Mr. Warner then details the Mauldin-Patton-Eisenhower kerfuffle of WWII and the Danish Mohammed cartoons of 2005 that led to the creation of Cartooning For Peace.
Today, Cartooning for Peace is an active international network of almost 400 editorial cartoonists from nearly 80 countries united by a clear mission. “Cartoonists play an essential role in shaping public opinion and subjecting officials to it,” wrote Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Cartoonists are no joke. They are an essential part of democracy.”
Conclusion: The government and the institutions of the United States are becoming intolerant of satire.
feature image by Edward Ardizzone
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