Events in cartooning happen without being marked. Newspaper comics get shrinked, and disappear as newspapers themselves disappear. I remember paging through the last issue of Good Housekeeping magazine that used gag cartoons some years ago. Good Housekeeping had published gag cartoon for all of its existence since Hearst bought it from its original owner in 1911. GH was a good market, but -- like First for Women, Harvard Business Review, Mad Magazine, Playboy, National Enquirer and other big national magazines - gag cartoons had been cut without fanfare or note.
Two-time Pulitzer Prize political cartoonist winner David Horsey writes about the decline of the political cartoon and the political cartoonists who create them in In praise of a dying breed: Political cartoonists, which appeared in the Seattle Times on August 25th, 2023. David is also the cartoonist at the Times.
Here's his complete commentary:
Political cartoonists took up their pens to offend the powerful and
defend the downtrodden as soon as the first publishers began
hand-cranking newspapers through their printing presses in the 18th
century. Benjamin Franklin created his own political art to fire up the
American Revolution. So did Paul Revere.
Now, two-and-a-half
centuries later, with thousands of newspapers having gone out of
business and most of the rest struggling to survive, political
cartoonists have become an endangered species. When newsroom jobs get
trimmed, the cartoonist is often among the first to go, even though
“those damned pictures” — as Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed characterized the
jugular art of Thomas Nast in the 1870s — are perennially popular with
readers.
A precise count of political cartoonists is elusive (or
editorial cartoonists, as they were classified by the Pulitzer Prize
until that category was cut from the foremost journalism contest a
couple of years ago). According to numbers provided by two of my friends
at the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, there were just
over 100 full-time editorial cartooning jobs at U.S. newspapers in 2008,
down from as many as 150 full- and part-time positions in 1997. Today, a
mere 20 or so are paid newspaper employees. A few more are contractors
(count me as one of them) creating work for one particular newspaper.
All of the rest are scrambling to pay the bills through freelance or
syndication or have left the profession.
Half a century ago, even
modest-sized newspapers in small cities often had a cartoonist on staff.
Many became local legends by lampooning city and state officials who
betrayed the public trust. Very few of those cartoonists were known
outside of their hometowns, but they were celebrities among their
readers, even the readers I characterize as “anti-fans.” Those are the
folks who disagree with what we cartoonists have to say, but return
every day to see the next lamebrained, ignorant image we produce.
A
few editorial cartoonists have transcended local notoriety. Bill
Mauldin became famous drawing cartoons from the front lines in Europe
during World War II. Paul Conrad was such an imposing presence at the
Los Angeles Times that he became publisher Otis Chandler’s regular
golfing partner. At The Washington Post, the great Herblock afflicted
miscreants in the White House and Congress for more than 50 years.
It
is telling that The Post no longer has a cartoonist on staff, though
two fine cartoonists, Michael de Adder and Ann Telnaes, produce cartoons
as contractors for the most important newspaper in the country’s most
political city. The LA Times has not hired a cartoonist since I parted
ways with the publication at the end of 2017 and the newspaper’s editors
appear to have no interest in filling Conrad’s seat.
Editors at The New York Times broke a longstanding aversion to
running political cartoons when they brought on Swiss cartoonist Patrick
Chappatte in 2001 to do work for The Times international edition. His
tenure ended curiously in 2019 when the newspaper got flak for a cartoon
about Israel drawn, not by Chappatte, but by a different artist. The
New York Times could not take the heat.
And heat is always part of
the deal. Any political cartoon is bound to offend somebody — or quite a
few somebodies — on a regular basis. Publishers who stick by their
cartoonists are wise enough to know that an occasionally enraged reader
is also an engaged reader.
Some publishers, though, become the
enraged parties themselves. Award-winning political cartoonist Rob
Rogers, a guy who was wildly popular with Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
subscribers, was fired in 2018. His offense? Drawing cartoons of former
President Donald Trump that annoyed his boss. The following year, Rogers
was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Pulitzers, though, are no
guarantee of job security, as I have personally twice discovered. In
2017, Pulitzer winner Nick Anderson was dismissed from the Houston
Chronicle simply because the owners wanted to save some money. Anderson
was the last on-staff editorial cartoonist in the entire state of Texas.
Another Pulitzer winner, Steve Benson, was laid off by The Arizona
Republic in 2019.
In July, the biggest bombshell yet hit the
depleted ranks of editorial cartoonists when McClatchy Newspapers axed
three Pulitzer winners in one day — Jack Ohman of The Sacramento Bee,
Kevin Siers of The Charlotte Observer and Joel Pett of the Lexington
Herald-Leader. On Google Meet, Ohman said, “I felt like I had been
T-boned at an intersection.”
In the aftermath of that collision,
McClatchy issued a news release that said the cartoonists had “provided
readers with sharp, artful and insightful commentary that holds
officials and institutions accountable. We are grateful for their
important contributions to journalism and their commitment to
excellence.”
That sounds more like an argument to give the cartoonists a raise, rather than lay them off.
A
separate statement from McClatchy opinion editor Peter St. Onge offered
a dubious excuse for getting rid of the cartoonists: “We made this
decision based on changing reader habits and our relentless focus on
providing the communities we serve with local news and information they
can’t get elsewhere.”
Which, of course, makes no sense at all.
Ohman, Siers and Pett were giving readers something truly unique that
“they can’t get elsewhere.”
The
more accurate explanation for why the editorial cartoonists were dumped
is starkly simple. McClatchy, like so many newspaper groups, has been
acquired by a hedge fund that cares more about profits than local
readers or community-based journalism. Hedge funds buy newspapers to
bleed them dry until they wither up and blow away. Editorial cartoonists
are simply another budget line item to be crossed out.
In other
parts of the world, political cartoonists are often threatened, thrown
in jail, attacked and even murdered. In this country, though threats
from angry yahoos do crop up now and then, we who test the limits of the
First Amendment by drawing “those damned pictures” have been kept safe
by readers who believe we contribute something useful to the democratic
process — insightful images with a bit of humor that make politics a
less dreary affair.
Unlike so many of our international
counterparts, we have never had to look over our shoulders to see if
cops or angry crowds are at the door. In the back of our minds, though,
we always suspected that, if anyone were to do us in, it would be the
corporate bean counters.
David Horsey
is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial
cartoonist for The Seattle Times. His latest book is “Drawing Apart:
Political Cartoons from a Polarized America.”
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