CSotD: Good catch
Skip to comments
A good editor can be your best friend. A good editor helps you get your point across and will not only help you make that point more clearly but can help you avoid getting tangled up in counter-productive side issues.
A bad editor can take the joy and panache out of work that needs both to be worthwhile, mostly by attempting to wrestle an opinion piece into the newspaper's "style."
I have fought this battle, trying to explain that columns should be written in the individual, perhaps even quirky, voice of the columnist, not the soulless HAL-9000 tones of the Associated Press.
The quintessential example of this phenomenon came during Molly Ivins' short-lived career as a New York Times columnist, when an editor, she reported, changed "a beergut that belongs in the Smithsonian" to "a protuberant abdomen."
I've had both kinds of editors; I've really tried to only be one.
And I think John Cole works with a pretty good editor at the Scranton (Pa) Times-Tribune.
Here's the cartoon he turned in yesterday:
and here's the cartoon that ran today, after he re-drew it at an editor's request:
I call that a good edit, and John didn't present the pair as an example of "poor pitiful me."
In fact, when I asked him for permission to use both versions (the first having only been unofficially released), he commented "I realized while drawing it that it might be perceived as being over-the-top by readers; then again, 'over-the-top' describes some of my favorites by other cartoonists. That said, the point is to get folks to argue about an issue, not about me or my cartoon."
Bingo.
There certainly are cartoonists who — for the most part, I think, unconsciously — would as readily have people argue about them and their cartoons as about the issue. At least they don't differentiate between the two phenomena, and they certainly feel that, if a cartoon doesn't generate hate mail, it wasn't effective.
Hate mail does show you've drawn blood, and it can be fun to exhibit the incoherent screaming as a trophy. But it needs to be well-targeted.
In this case, you don't want to get side-tracked by an accusation that the military would purposely launch a drone against a small child, when you can make the same accusation about the targeting of a civilian vehicle.
The difference to me, as an editor, is that, when the angry phone calls come in, I can't defend a cartoon that suggests evil intentions but I can readily defend one that shows too little regard for unintended consequences.
The question being argued here is the ethical problems of sloppy targeting and an over-eagerness to launch against questionable targets. There is a huge and critical distinction between the ethics of intentional murder and the ethics of "shit happens."
(If you can't see the difference between purposeful intentions and unintended consequences, here's a primer.)
Cole is lucky to have an editor who can work with him to come up with the nuanced distinction between those two versions of the cartoon. The editor, in turn, is lucky to have a cartoonist who doesn't instinctively kick back at any suggested change.
An excellent edit and a powerful cartoon that will cause a lot of people to stop and think, but that will also, I'm sure, engender some hate mail.
But it will be relevant hate mail, from people who deserved a slap-down.
The good kind of hate mail.
Comments 1
Comments are closed.