Some days, there’s nothing funny about comics

The meanest boss I ever worked for gave me a lot of great advice about newspapers, but none more important than this:

“If you want to make readers mad,” he said, “just take away their favorite comic strip.”

We made some readers mad this week, and we probably made an equal number happy. In a way, I suppose, that adds up to “business as usual” — but this time, the reasons were anything but normal.

The Enterprise-Record joined dozens of other MediaNews Group publications, and hundreds of newspapers across the country, in dropping “Dilbert” as a comic strip following some shockingly racist comments made by its author, Scott Adams. (Sunday comics are printed well in advance, so it’ll be another week before the change takes place in that section.)

We did not make this decision lightly, or without a great deal of deliberation.

Personally, I loved “Dilbert.” I loved its satire and clever looks at all-too-typical office life from the 1990s onward, and I kept on loving it the past seven years, when many readers became turned off by Adams’ on-again and off-again support of Donald Trump. Adams’ ever-evolving political stances angered a lot of readers — especially the sizable number who don’t like Trump — and many demanded we drop the cartoon for that reason.

We never did. We welcome a mix of opinions in our newspaper, including on the comics page, and “this piece is too conservative or too liberal” never figures into our thinking. Thus, just as we’ve never dropped “Doonesbury” for being “too liberal,” we never considered dropping “Dilbert” because its author had become “too conservative.”

Sometimes, though, we’ll find ourselves in a no-win situation. It happened four years ago with another cartoon, “Non Sequitur,” whose author purposely inserted an obscenity directed at Trump into a cartoon panel, and it happened this past month with “Dilbert.”

In both cases, we were left with two choices: We could cancel the cartoon and anger some readers — or we could keep the cartoon and anger an equal number of readers, since the Enterprise-Record’s readership represents a remarkably even mix of political viewpoints.

So, regardless of which decision we made, it was going to hurt us as a business, and how unique is that to our world?

In both cases, we simply made the best decision we could, a decision that had nothing to do with “censorship” or “violating someone’s First Amendment rights.” We have

First Amendment rights, too, and it’s an obligation we honor with near-holy reverence.

Be it a progressive columnist like Cynthia Tucker or a conservative like George Will, we’ll always stand behind the First Amendment and our right to publish a mix of opinions. The diverse variety we publish on a weekly basis should prove that beyond any doubt. Likewise, while I’ll occasionally return letters to the editor because of things like hatefilled personal attacks, I’ve never returned one because I didn’t agree with an opinion. Any unbiased look at our Opinion page over the course of several days should prove that.

On the other hand, we won’t stand behind comments that cross basic lines of human decency, or fuel further divisiveness while espousing the absolute worst in racial behavior. We weren’t OK with Wiley Miller purposely inserting that obscenity about Trump into “Non Sequitur” four years ago, and we’re definitely not OK with Scott Adams calling Black Americans “a hate group” while saying White people “should get the hell away from Black people.”

In both cases, we felt the change was warranted because of words that added more to hate-filled divisiveness than they contributed to any actual well-informed discourse. The idea that we “caved to pressure” is nonsense. Pressure from who? We were guaranteed to lose some readers either way, so we simply made the best decision we could.

And on that note, I invite you to turn to the Sunday comics section. Hopefully you’ll get a few laughs along the way, and couldn’t we all use a few more of those right about now?