
The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times - tin7in
https://www.chappatte.com/en/the-end-of-political-cartoons-at-the-new-york-times/
======
dlivingston
"We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like
a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires
immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or
meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most
outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows
in."

This is a significant problem, not just for newsrooms, but for companies and
individuals.

Nuance is not permitted in 2019 - this is simply the latest flavor of
puritanical outrage that grips humanity. From the Salem witch trials to the
Red Scare to the Harry Potter book burnings of the early 2000s, we are now
privy to the latest incarnation of something as old as homo sapiens
themselves.

The issue now is that the puritanical outrage stretches past the pulpit and
Letters to the Editor and directly into your notifications, your DMs, your
timeline; broadcast across the world and sending newsrooms and corporations
scrambling with half-arsed apologies.

~~~
gfodor
It does confuse me that these mobs have such power on decision makers at
companies and media outlets like this. The interesting thing about Twitter
"mobs" is that if you look away from the computer screen or hit the button on
the side of your phone, they are suddenly silent and may as well not exist.
You can, in fact, log out of Twitter and never log back in again. Most of the
time doing so will have zero long term negative impact, since the mob is
fickle, trapped in their filter bubbles, and will move onto the next outrage
in days if not hours.

The mobs that cause doxing or have credible threats of harm upon on
individuals (like job loss or even violence) do in fact wield incredible,
terrifying power though.

~~~
quietbritishjim
> It does confuse me that these mobs have such power on decision makers at
> companies and media outlets like this. The interesting thing about Twitter
> "mobs" is that if you look away from the computer screen or hit the button
> on the side of your phone, they are suddenly silent and may as well not
> exist.

If you are a company then bad stories on Twitter could cause a significant
drop in business. So if you just choose to ignore Twitter, that does not mean
that it may as well not exist.

~~~
__i___ii____
The angry vocal minority on twitter (people who may not even be customers,
perhaps likely are not) really has such an effect on a company's sales? Got
any examples?

~~~
Wistar
Well, there is the Uriah’s Heating and Cooling case in Ohio last year.

[https://www.dispatch.com/news/20180729/theodore-decker-
colum...](https://www.dispatch.com/news/20180729/theodore-decker-column-
racist-words-blow-back-on-man-family-and-business)

------
NE2z2T9qi
I think this piece is a great example of smug, establishment romanticism which
grossly overvalues form over function. A political cartoon hasn't made me
laugh, think deeply, or--most importantly--change my worldview in years. It's
the most self-satisfied, pretentious, and outdated medium I know of. The
author's notion that the loss of political cartoons is a serious loss of
visual political culture is a self-absorbed joke. Visual political memes have
become a massive and persistent grassroots social phenomenon with far more
influence and engagement than too-clever-by-half political cartoons... not to
mention certain animated shows with extremely sharp political and social
satire. I don't think the author really regrets loss of political discourse. I
think he regrets no longer being considered part of the political chattering-
class establishment, even as that establishment loses its influence in a world
of democratized information flow and opinion-sharing.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh or think deeply in years.

This probably says more about you than about political cartoons as a medium.

Is it possible that you have become so used to over-the-top memes and shallow
animated shows with instant-gratification "satire" that you have lost the
ability (and/or patience) to pause and ponder the subtler, many-layered
messages underneath traditional cartoons?

~~~
jimmaswell
Could you post one of these alleged subtle and multi-layered political
cartoons, with a short analysis?

~~~
probably_wrong
I learned last month that there's a Pulitzer price in Editorial Cartooning.
This is the winner of 2019 (and the runner ups), so I'd say that's as good as
it gets: [https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/darrin-bell-
freelancer](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/darrin-bell-freelancer)

~~~
MrMember
Political cartoonists really like Trump's long ties.

------
hestefisk
This reminds me of the famous Muhammad drawings in 2005 in Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten (JP). Back then they were seen as a defence of free speech and
our democratic rights, a way of mocking the draconian regimes of the Middle
East. Had it happened again today, the Puritan twittersphere would have been
all over it and JP would likely have had to follow same route as NYT. Very
sad.

~~~
praneshp
> Back then they were seen as a defence of free speech and our democratic
> rights, a way of mocking the draconian regimes of the Middle East

Was this an universal viewpoint in the West? As a non-Muslim teen in India I
saw it as mocking Islam (I get that others' mileage varies).

~~~
cm2187
In the case of Charlie Hebdo the intention was clearly to mock Islam indeed.
But I am mystified that we are questioning in 2019 the right to blasphemy in a
modern, western, free, secular society.

~~~
Bakary
If publishing a cartoon causes your death I think the mockery may well have
been legitimate.

~~~
rchaud
Was there some Vatican-equivalent Islamic body that commissioned a hit on the
CH offices? No, it was a terrorist cell that wanted to attain both easy
publicity and make life worse for European Muslims.

"Legitimate" mockery would have exposed the absurdity of terrorist groups
recruiting petty criminals and elevating them to a noble "jihadi" status
because, well, nobody else had as little to lose.

But that wouldn't get any media coverage, nor would it get props for
"upholding free speech", in a country that outlaws Holocaust denial.

~~~
Bakary
I can personally attest that making fun of terrorists specifically in the
manner you describe is a common topic in the French cartoon world, and
especially common in CH. So it indeed wouldn't get any sort of media coverage
because it's not a novel event in any way.

I don't deny that there was a lot of hypocrisy and fair weather friends
surrounding CH after they were targeted, but the point about the Holocaust
laws misses the mark. It's not illegal in France to make crass jokes about the
Holocaust, as CH makes them in droves. In fact, they make crass jokes about
almost anything related to France in some way and their first love always was
the opposition to the traditional gaullist catholic establishment. You can be
as crass as you want and won't get in trouble for it as long as you don't
incite violence directly.

The problem highlighted by CH is that there currently is only one ideology
that gives artists, filmmakers, cartoonists, etc. pause in the West when
drawing up jokes or material, and that is Islam. There are few other topics in
the West where there is a chance that criticism or commentary on your part
will cause you great personal adversity or harm. In fact, I can't think of any
off the top of my head but I'd be happy to hear some examples.

------
mevile
Political cartoons are, in my opinion, reductionist garbage that fail to take
into consideration nuance and complexity and context. The caricature that
inflate the size of ears and chins and lips and noses is not dignifying and
doesn't add any value to whatever argument is being made, and can sometimes
even be racist. There's no rebuttal to a political cartoon, there's no
dialogue. They're cheap and easy to make and easy to consume and are just as
easy to forget.

I don't care if they exist or not, either way I don't read them, but standing
up for political cartoons as being a thing worth defending, I don't think it
is. I think they hurt more than they help.

Go look at political cartoons from the sides of opinions you disagree with and
see how they make you feel. Are they convincing you of anything or are they
just making you mad?

~~~
roenxi
Standing up for free speech is a great thing to do; to reframe what you are
saying we are dealing with one of the mildest outlets for anger that a
demographic could possibly express. We want people to do that rather than
escalating to, eg, yelling at people in person.

People get angry all the time and a lot of them don't know how to deal with
it. A political cartoon may not be a shining example of debate but it is a
great way to let people see that their feelings are understood and broadly
communicated.

If it doesn't cover expressing an unpopular, offensive and unimportant opinion
as an image, what does free speech mean to you? Are we only to have free
speech on topics are declared important by popular survey?

Just to make it clear why that is a ridiculous idea, the principle of free
speech is ultimately not for majorities, it is for minorities. You don't
really need a concept of free speech to talk about things that are widely
recognised as important and worthwhile by everyone. It is top protect things
that are generally believed to be better left unsaid. Things like purposefully
upsetting people with a cartoon.

~~~
mevile
A newspaper not publishing political cartoons is not a free speech issue. If
the government were banning political cartoons, then it would be. A newspaper
can print or not print whatever it wants.

~~~
meruru
It may not be an issue of Free Speech (however you define it), but it's still
an issue of freedom to speak.

(My point is that you're trying to dismiss an issue by claiming to not fit an
arbitrary category, but you haven't argued why not being into that category
makes it a non-issue.)

------
kristianc
> "We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise
> like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires
> immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or
> meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most
> outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows
> in."

It's strange, and perhaps unfortunate, that having pinned the blame on
"Twitter Mobs", the examples he chooses to give are where cartoonists have
been silenced by autocratic regimes (Turkey, Venezuela, Russia). The solution
in these cases is to push back and defend press freedom, not to cave in and
blame faceless social media mobs.

And when it comes to 'social media' mobs, is anyone really going to come into
bat for the NYT and claim that the below is not _really_ anti-semitic or
homophobic? If you need to lean on anti-Semitic or homophobic tropes let me
suggest you're not as funny, incisive or subversive as you think you are.
Comparing yourself to CH in such circumstances is to claim a martrydom you
don't really deserve [1] [2]

[1] [https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-
antisemi...](https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemitic-
cartoon-roundly-condemned/)

[2] [https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-
trump...](https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump-putin-
cartoon-criticized-homophobic-n891811)

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
>[https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-
antisemi...](https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemitic-
cartoon-roundly-condemned/)

Criticising Israel and pro-Israel policy != antisemitism

>[https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-
trump...](https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump-putin-
cartoon-criticized-homophobic-n891811)

I don't see how it's homophobic. The cartoon portrays Trump and Putin as
lovers, supposedly to mock their alleged closeness. It doesn't attack
homosexual people.

If the cartoon were portraying e.g. Merkel and Putin, in similar roles, would
you call it "heterophobic" (is that a word?), or would it be perfectly
acceptable?

~~~
legostormtroopr
> The cartoon portrays Trump and Putin as lovers, supposedly to mock their
> alleged closeness. It doesn't attack homosexual people.

It does attack homosexual people. You can't use "gay" as a slur or as a
punchline to a joke anymore. The punchline of the joke isn't "they're close",
its "they're so close they're gay".

That makes "being gay" an active of derision or humour, which is an attack on
gay people.

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
>It does attack homosexual people. You can't use "gay" as a slur or as a
punchline to a joke anymore. The punchline of the joke isn't "they're close",
its "they're so close they're gay".

No, the punchline of the joke is "they're so close it's almost like they're in
a relationship". Of course it has to be a gay relationship, because they're
both men.

As I said before, the joke would work just as well if the cartoon depicted a
woman and a man.

------
starik36
The decision to no longer have political cartoons reminds me of something from
earlier days. Someone at the multinational I worked at did a prod a deployment
and it went pretty badly. There was downtime of about 15-20 minutes. So
immediately an edict comes from up high - we shall never have deployment
during hours of x to y. Just massive CYA.

The guy isn't wrong about twitter mobs mowing down everything in their path
and that's stupid. But he is speaking about it now, when it affected him. He
had a great podium - should have said something when it was directed at
someone he didn't like.

~~~
sgift
> The guy isn't wrong about twitter mobs mowing down everything in their path
> and that's stupid. But he is speaking about it now, when it affected him. He
> had a great podium - should have said something when it was directed at
> someone he didn't like.

Seems like he did. From the post:

> Over the last years, with the Cartooning for Peace Foundation we established
> with French cartoonist Plantu and the late Kofi Annan - a great defender of
> cartoons - or on the board of the Association of American Editorial
> Cartoonists, I have consistently warned about the dangers of those sudden
> (and often organized) backlashes that carry everything in their path.

~~~
starik36
Ahhh, you are right. My bad. Good catch.

------
RickJWagner
Yes, this.

Politically correct mobs are changing the world for the worst. In today's
world, Eddie Murphy wouldn't make it out the door. And we would be worse off
for it.

The great irony is that the very comedians who are being retroactively
condemned were cutting-edge for breaking barriers in their day. John Cleese is
a glaring example.

I have high hopes the pendulum will some day swing back the other way, and we
will all be able to laugh at today's overzealous critics.

~~~
smsm42
It it not just irony, it is on purpose. The PC party has largely captured the
media, the academy and the polite society. There are still some local
resistance here and there, but in a large measure they won this round of
cultural war. So they do not need any troublemakers anymore, they don't want
people that constantly test and push the boundaries of acceptable and reveal
the absurdity of power and the nakedness of the kings. They are setting the
boundaries now, they are the power and they are the kings - why would they
tolerate some jackasses questioning what they have struggled so long to
achieve? They done their part in the revolution, now to the re-education camps
with them! If you read the history of any recent revolution, you'd see this
pattern repeated over and over.

------
stickfigure
The actual cartoon, in case anyone (like me) is missing context:

[https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-deeply-sorry-for-
anti...](https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-deeply-sorry-for-anti-semitic-
cartoon-of-netanyahu-and-trump/)

~~~
Balgair
Thanks!

Overall, this seems fairly tame to me. What am I missing? I'm honestly at a
loss here.

~~~
frittig
it reminds people of this
[https://mobile.twitter.com/kishkushkay/status/11222905077141...](https://mobile.twitter.com/kishkushkay/status/1122290507714113538)

~~~
apexalpha
The first pic has a stereotypical Jew up front the second the prime minister
of a country that is highly influential of US foreign policy. I think the
comparison is stretch.

It seems that any cartoon on Israel will simply be marked 'anti-Semitic' by
opponents.

------
mAEStro-paNDa
Here's an article over the cartoon mentioned here that sparked outrage in
April which led to this:

[https://nypost.com/2019/04/28/new-york-times-condemned-
for-a...](https://nypost.com/2019/04/28/new-york-times-condemned-for-anti-
semitic-netanyahu-trump-cartoon/)

~~~
nerpderp82
Can someone explain how the cartoon is antisemetic? Calling it such doesn't
make it so. If I blend Putin into a Cassowary crossed with a Peacock would it
not be apropos? Cartoons are supposed to be edgy and uncomfortable.

It looks like like the NYT succumbed to the mob whipped up by the Trump
administration, it meerly doesn't want the criticism.

~~~
Rebelgecko
Showing a non-Jewish world leader in a yarmulke put it a bit over the top for
me. I think the star of David was fair game because it's a symbol of Israel as
a country, but depicting Trump as some sort of crypto-Jew felt like imagery
you'd see in Nazi propaganda or an illustrated version of The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion.

~~~
ikeyany
The idea is that Trump is working for Israel. What in the world is a crypto-
Jew? Does it use a blockchain?

~~~
dbcurtis
> What in the world is a crypto-Jew?

LMGTFY:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-
Judaism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-Judaism)

Staying out of sight to stay alive, basically.

~~~
ikeyany
Oh...I don't think anyone relevant seriously thinks he's a crypto-Jew. People
just think he's spineless and is easily manipulatable by Putin/Kim/Netanyahu.

~~~
prepend
Do you think it is strange how he is so easily manipulated but yet Shumer and
Pelosi and his own staff and many others fail to manipulate him?

This seems like such an odd, easily disproved statement that I am surprised
when so many repeat it.

I’m not a fan, but it seems more like his regular failure than some
manipulation trait.

------
heegemcgee
Wayback Machine cache:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20190610203116/https://www.chappa...](http://web.archive.org/web/20190610203116/https://www.chappatte.com/en/the-
end-of-political-cartoons-at-the-new-york-times/)

------
mamurphy
Relevant tweet that links to this same article and has a self-referential
political cartoon:
[https://twitter.com/PatChappatte/status/1138145415604449280](https://twitter.com/PatChappatte/status/1138145415604449280)

The linked article is currently down for me, as is the Google cache; does
anyone have a mirror? I presume the article explains the Netanyahu cartoon
that the tweet references.

My hot take without (being able to be) reading the article: No more political
humor because of an internet mob seems like quite the shame.

------
donohoe
To be clear, the NYT never did a lot of cartoons nor was it known for them.

I really don’t think this is a big deal.

If The New Yorker or sone other publication did, then maybe.

~~~
colpabar
My issue isn't that they no longer have political cartoons, it's why they made
the decision to remove them. And to be fair, we don't know yet. I haven't
found an official statement from the NYT on this; I've only seen tweets and
this guy's piece on it.

~~~
donohoe
There is no ‘official’ Statement because this isn’t a big deal. This is in the
realm of deciding what freelances to go with given budgets and other factors.

To this guy, this decision is clearly significant. For someone at NYT it was
just another Tuesday.

------
IdontRememberIt
A few weeks before that event, he was on Swiss TV (he lives in Geneva) saying
that he never felt pressure and did not care... Sad...

------
TomMckenny
The article raises a very important point but unless I'm missing something,
the comments here are identical to the twitter mob being talked about.

Are not statements quickly ripped of in a heat of emotion and consisting
solely of impressions, rumors, opinions, hyperbole and intentional bias
exactly the problem?

------
pgodzin
> This is the era of images. In a world of short attention span, their power
> has never been so big.

Given the reach of social media with respect to images, cartoons, memes, etc,
do we need newspapers to be the distributors of political cartoons? Does it
simply add legitimacy to some cartoons to separate them from the huge amount
of low quality social media content?

------
100100010001
The New York Times is the best paper in the world? Sounds like an absolute
without any parameters or qualifiers...

------
b_tterc_p
Non political comic about political comics that I think about sums up the
value of political comics (language warning, I guess)

[http://smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-07-02](http://smbc-
comics.com/comic/2008-07-02)

------
hybrids
This seems less like a case the "oh, the PC Police want to do away with
political humor!" and more just shifting tides in media - i.e. that the
conventional newspaper political cartoon is a form trending towards
obsolescence. Political comedy is very much alive, at least in terms of its
popularity and range across the political spectrum, attracting from the far
left (e.g. Chapo Trap House) to liberals (e.g. most late night hosts) to all
your various forms of conservatives (e.g. Crowder). To me the "political
cartoon" as we once knew it seems like a dated formula, one that might be
argued has already been replaced by the format of internet memes which can
serve similar political function.

(Also personally I have never really cared for political cartoons, they've
always seemed unfunny and too reductionist. Although I suppose the Stan Kelly
Cartoons from The Onion might be an exception.)

------
Fjolsvith
I am mildly curious if the recent publication of Mark Levin's "Unfreedom of
the Press" has any bearing on the changes happening at NYT.

------
rdiddly
So the Times was like "Hey everybody we found the problem: It's _the fact that
we have political cartoons_?"

------
enterx
This is what you get when you let the mob rule.

------
CptFribble
Social media isn't the problem, low-information mob behavior has always been a
thing. Pretty much all of the lynchings that ever happened in the USA occurred
way before Jack Dorsey was a twinkle in his father's eye.

The problem is the structural flaws built into our brains.

Consider vision. If I showed you a wall of visual noise with a human face
somewhere in the middle, you'd likely pick out the face in an instant. That's
because we have physical structures in our visual cortex that specifically
filter the information coming down the optic nerve for human faces.

What's funny is that higher judgement seems to work the same way. For most of
the history of homo sapiens, we've lived in relatively small groups, and only
interacted with comparatively limited amounts of information (compared to the
typical internet feed). Think about all the things represented by scrolling
down instagram: products and their place in your life, hundreds of people
you've met over many years, trends and fads and memes which are themselves
complex multi-layered ideas requiring lots of insider knowledge to grasp.

All of this is way more information than what a typical person had to deal
with until about 100 years ago at the earliest.

So what's a brain to do? Our minds filter the incoming information until it's
distilled down to the simplest possible version, the one with little nuance
and zero subtlety. That's the idea that catches, because we lack the machinery
to process 10,000 minor details for every little thing we do all the time.

Apply this to political discourse and you'll see why major political
candidates spend precious minutes arguing over whether "socialism is bad," or
"capitalism is bad." I'm sure many here understand it's way more complicated
than that, but if you tried to get a real discussion going about nit-picky
policy stuff, it'd go nowhere.

I'm not about to decry "attention spans these days" or anything, because
frankly I don't think people are any different than they were 500 years ago,
not really. And that's the problem. The only thing that's changed is what
amounts to "common knowledge" these days, which is usually also an
oversimplification of scientific reality.

The problem is that the world is just too big and too complex for our ill-
adapted chimp brains to fully grasp, at least at the population scale, and
Twitter and the like amplify this effect.

I don't have any solutions. But I know that we should keep doing the one thing
humans are good at: building better tools. We can't exactly make society
_less_ complex, but we can probably make tools to understand it without losing
(as much) nuance.

That's the only option I can see for fixing this sort of thing in the near-
future, because even if these social media problems created selection pressure
on humans (which I doubt), it'd be a long long time before we were cranking
out baby Homo Interneticus.

------
vlozc
I thought they had to close because they ripped off a Ziggy.

------
babyslothzoo
How depressing.

------
unethical_ban
Was there an announcement by the New York Times to do this? I am not calling
him into question; I just wonder with what silence and shame they have made
this decision.

Should they next ban their op-eds for their sometimes offensive ideas
expressed?

------
ehvatum
The drastic step of eliminating all political cartoons carries a very specific
and misleading implication, if one assumes that the NYT is impartial. Which
they are not: [https://nypost.com/2019/04/30/anti-semitic-scandal-at-the-
ne...](https://nypost.com/2019/04/30/anti-semitic-scandal-at-the-new-york-
times-isnt-surprising/)

With that in mind, ceasing publication of all political cartoons evidences
extremely poor editorial discretion at the NYT. What, they are incapable of
excluding Palestinian propaganda? Apparently:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/middleeast/christma...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/middleeast/christmas-
lebanon.html)

~~~
ehvatum
To elaborate on my comment, by eliminating all cartoons, the NYT invites one
to think that politically correct over-sensitivity is the cause. Otherwise,
why would they not simply avoid publishing anti-Semitic cartoons? Indeed, the
author of the blog post suggests that "Twitter mobs" are at fault. But the NYT
has an extensive, dark history of profoundly harmful anti-Semitism, including
the editorial stance that the Holocaust was not occurring, as it occurred.
This is extensively detailed in Buried by the Times, and is supported by that
book's absolutely mammoth bibliography: [https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Times-
Holocaust-Important-News...](https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Times-Holocaust-
Important-Newspaper/dp/0521607825)

