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Dallas News Drops Sunday Doonesbury – Unfair to Trump

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Doonesbury by G. B. Trudeau top tier for August 25, 2024

Letters to the Editor of The Dallas Morning News:

One by one I have seen media outlets across the country bend the knee and kiss the ring of the new regime. …

The paper has taken 10 steps backward by completely dropping Doonesbury on Sundays, not just every time it offends the editors’ sensibilities. This is more editorial cowardice from the paper…

Doonesbury by G. B. Trudeau top tier from September 8, 2024

From the Morning Dallas News:

“In the interest of fairness and balance, we are no longer running Doonesbury in the Sunday comics section. You can find classic Doonesbury on our daily comics pages.”

Doonesbury by G. B. Trudeau top tier from October 6, 2024

For months, going back to at least August 2024, The Dallas Morning News has been “monitoring” the Sunday Doonesbury comic strip in order to replace those featuring Donald Trump with other, older Doonesbury Sunday comic strips inoffensive to the editors’ (and MAGA?) sensibilities.

For months, The Dallas Morning News has run older Doonesbury strips on Sundays in place of those that assail President Donald Trump. Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau has been a longtime critic of Trump, and his attacks grew only sharper during last year’s presidential campaign. And he has not let up.

Finally, The News’ top editors decided: Enough.

Doonesbury by G. B. Trudeau top tier from November 3, 2024

From Public Editor Stephen Buckley:

When I wrote about Doonesbury in this space in October [link added], I noted that over the years, many newspapers had moved it to their Opinion sections. It is a political strip, after all. And housing it there would assuage its readers while acknowledging the unusual place the Pulitzer Prize-winning strip holds among comics. Editorial Page Editor Rudy Bush said, “No thanks.”

Doonesbury by G. B. Trudeau top tier from December 29, 2024

Grant Moise, publisher and president of The News, signed off on [the editors’] decision. “I want The Dallas Morning News to be seen as a news source rooted in fairness and balance,” he said. “When a comic strip (or any other source) we publish detracts from that goal, we must make decisions supporting our objectives and values.”

Read Stephen Buckley’s entire defense for The Dallas Morning News dropping the Sunday Doonesbury.

Doonesbury by G. B. Trudeau top tier from January 19, 2025
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Comments 6

  1. While recent mainstream polls show President Trump’s popularity and policies are overwhelming popular, it’s sad to see an iconic strip deteriorate into such abysmal bitterness and predictability. Media outlets are wise to realize that the Hitler, dictator and felon tags have grown stale and lost their bite.

    1. Keep an eye on those polls. They’re trending the other way and we’re only a month in.

    2. Mr. Popularity’s approval rating is hanging out around 45% on more than one poll, but okay. Lots of people have a hard time getting their heads around that sunk cost fallacy.

    3. Welp, as your brethren in cynical sophistry love to say when Wyoming’s twelve votes per resident are tallied up, it’s a republic, not a democracy. Sabotage, vandalism, blackmail and computer security breaches are all still illegal, and the Constitution still gives Congress, not the king or his criminal associates, the prerogative to decide where our money goes.

      You’ll maybe want to be backing up that “overwhelming” with some numbers, cos it wasn’t looking great at the beginning of his term, and it’s only gotten worse from there.

  2. Wake up, fellow Americans! Your democracy is becoming an authoritarian system.

  3. Hope this won’t end up being a situation for other newspapers to follow suit after the Dallas Morning News recently dropped Sunday first run Doonesbury strips (not unlike Candorville meetings its end after Darrin Bell got the slammer),

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