Telnaes and The Greater Good
Skip to comments
Echoes from Ann Telnaes walking away from The Washington Post continue to resonate. While Ann is the starting point the discussion has evolved into a broader discussion about editorial cartoons and the newspaper industry. Yesterday we linked to newspaper editor Tom Lawrence’s column emphasizing the need for editorial cartooning.
Today Brittany Allen at Literary Hub gives a brief history of U. S. editorial cartooning from Benjamin Franklin to Ann Telnaes. Along the way Allen identifies points along the way where political cartoonists faced pressure then as they do today.
According to the First Amendment Museum, around 1950 “newspaper advertisers and publishers began exerting more of an influence over political cartoons.” And as digital media increased a cartoon’s reach and lifespan (if not its artist’s salary), persecution became a vivid threat.
In 1999, Robert ‘Bro’ Russell founded Cartoonists Rights, “the first global human rights organization” dedicated to protecting cartoonists who’ve been targeted by their arguably humorless subjects. In 2006, a similar mission called Freedom Cartoonists is born from a UN summit on intolerance.
The Telnaes resignation and editorial cartooning has become an international topic.
[Ann Telnaes] wrote … I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness’”.
Well, she was wrong about her resignation not causing ‘much of a stir’.
Granville Williams at Yorkshire Bylines brings attention to the struggles editorial cartoonists have faced – Herblock during the McCarthy Era, Britain during the Miners Strike, McClatchy dismissing their staff cartoonists, the tragic Charlie Hebdo massacre – all with the intention of creating “anticipatory obedience.”
So far “those damn pictures” continue to appear, if not on the editorial pages of cowardly newspapers at least, as Ann proved, they are being widely spread on the world wide web. The Boston Globe has not succumbed to the obey in advance pressures, they continue to publish revealing cartoons like those of Sage Stossel whose latest, a history and advocacy of U.S. cartooning, separates the prose above.
Go here to see Sage’s “An Artist’s Principled Stand” as a single page (supersizeable to avoid the squinting).
Comments 2