No more editorial cartoons?
Editorial cartoons are disappearing when they are most needed. My own cartoons often used to appear in my local Los Angeles Daily News, but not anymore.
The Daily News and about a dozen associated, conservativeleaning papers surrounding Los Angeles eliminated their traditional, daily spot for an editorial cartoon, running only one cartoon in their Sunday editions; these papers now have no editorial page at all on Mondays and Saturdays.
Many small newspapers are dropping their editorial pages entirely. Some editors tell me that editorial pages “only make readers angry” and “don’t bring in advertising income.”
The Los Angeles area is now an editorial cartoon desert. The Los Angeles Times, a newspaper with a rich editorial cartooning history, runs only one cartoon per week, on low-circulation Fridays.
A mid-sized, conservative, Pennsylvania newspaper, The Butler Eagle, recently created some buzz in the cartooning community by leaving its regular cartoon spot blank as a protest because the editor couldn’t find a cartoon that he liked. The opinion editor of this newspaper came perilously close to doing the same Friday for the same reason.
Since Trump’s election, antiTrump cartoons have flooded the syndicated services The Signal takes, leaving few other selections and at times nearly none. The Signal runs more liberal viewpoints two days a week and conservative on the other two. The Saturday issue aims for neutrality.
We read a lot about editorial cartoonists and other journalists losing staff jobs, but we don’t read much about newspapers dropping editorial cartoons. But the fever pitch of today’s partisanship makes the American journalistic tradition of visual lampoons, caricatures or parody a risky proposition for timid or budget-strapped newspaper editors.
Liberal-leaning newspapers often run two cartoons, from the left and the right. They do the same with columnists, running contrasting conservative and liberal columns.
Most conservative editors prefer to print only conservative content. There are about 1,400 daily newspapers in America.
The largest circulation newspapers tend to be liberal, but there are very few big-city newspapers compared to the much larger number of conservative editors at smaller rural and suburban papers whose readers voted for Trump.
I run a small “syndicate” that distributes dozens of editorial cartoonists and columnists to about half of America’s daily, paid-circulation newspapers.
Most of our clients are conservative editors who complain loudly and often that “there are no pro-Trump cartoons.” We’ve been fielding many of these calls from editors in recent days.
We’ve gotten some calls from other media searching for proTrump cartoons online, asking us where to find them. One TV news outlet wanted to have a roundtable discussion between pro- and anti-Trump cartoonists; they had searched the Web and found cartoons by a few amateur political cartoonists posting “pro-Trump” drawings on social media.
In repeated conversations, I explain the difference between professional cartoonists whose work is published by others and amateurs who post on their own social media accounts – but it seems that the distinction between professional and amateur editorial cartoonists is being lost.
The reality is the cartoonists criticize whoever is in office. Editors saw eight years of cartoonists criticizing Obama from both the left and the right. The perception was that a cartoon criticizing Obama must be a conservative cartoon.
No that the criticism is aimed at Trump, many conservative editors see the editorial cartoons as suddenly coming from the “liberal mainstream media.” Their solution? Drop the cartoons.
Sad times for our profession continue.
Some editors tell me that editorial pages ‘only make readers angry.’