Press Watch, “devoted to encouraging political journalists to fulfill their essential mission of creating an informed electorate,” is not happy with the current state of affairs as far as political cartoons featured on The Washington Post’s opinion pages (or the written opinion pieces either for that matter).
After praising The Post’s past (Herblock, Toles) Dan Froomkin points out Ann Telnaes as an oasis in a desert:
… What the Post opinion pages always excelled at, however, was political cartooning…
… And now, opinion editor David Shipley – installed a year ago by Post owner Jeff Bezos — has largely replaced political cartoons with a rotation of pathetic, unfunny “gag” cartoons that aren’t political at all. That is tragic.
Froomkin is not happy with the occupation of gag cartoons on the op-ed pages:
Technically, they’re “New Yorker style,” but they wouldn’t make the cut at Highlights, not to mention the New Yorker.
Read Froomkin’s full disappointment with the WaPo’s choice of cartoons for their ed-op page here.
I was wondering if this would come up here. I don’t think the cartoons are as bad as Froomkin thinks they are–a couple of them made me chuckle–but they’re definitely not editorial page cartoons. The Post has also replaced the Saturday collection of editorial cartoons with one large multi-panel cartoon, usually as funny as a bar of soap. I know it’s the job of old guys like me to complain that Things Aren’t as Good as They Used to Be, but in the past year or so the Post has dropped the Sunday opinion section, the Washington Post Magazine (I remember the first one!) and has gotten considerably thinner. Yes, it’s happening everywhere, and it was probably inevitable that it would happen to the Post.