Another editorial cartoonist, Darrin Bell, weighed in to compare the difference between the fearless media of the 1970s and the careful media today. And just as important, he compares how social media has changed the expectations of readers.

Bell writes:

Ann Telnaes is a brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post, and I’m proud to know her. Yesterday, she posted to her Substack that after The Post rejected this rough sketch, she resigned in protest:

I’ve spoken on a couple panels about editorial cartooning alongside Ann Telnaes. The first one was at a 2017 (or was it 2016?) convention in Columbus Ohio. The second was years later at the University of Virginia. 

In 2017, I told that audience how I broke into the industry through perseverance, by making myself stand out, and by proving myself to opinion page editors and to the newspaper syndicates. I felt such pride in recounting that story. But in 2023, it hit differently. As I opened my mouth to speak to students who don’t remember a time before social media, suddenly I felt that this generation was more likely to interpret my “inspirational” tale as one of how I groveled for years before gatekeepers. 

The obsolete origin story

Instead, I told the UVA students that my origin story was now obsolete. It’s not a road map they should follow anymore. I advised them to avoid newspapers altogether and reach readers directly through services such as Substack. I surprised myself. I wasn’t sure why I said that.

So I kept talking, and discovered why as I spoke. I’d been harboring frustration that, until then, I’d managed to suppress. 

Before I was born, the Washington Post’s reporters (and their cartoonist, Herblock) led the coverage that brought down Richard Nixon. That’s when the right wing began playing a long game, with the goal of neutering the Media. By 2023, they’d convinced most Americans that pretty much any media not owned by right wing ideologues were just cogs in a liberal conspiracy machine. 

The press is the only industry the Constitution specifically protects. But when I spoke to those UVA students, I could not tell them that newspapers were fulfilling the function the Founders had intended them to fulfill. The Founders had a lot of lousy ideas, but enshrining the press as the main line of defense against creeping authoritarianism wasn’t one of them.

I’d won a Pulitzer a few years earlier for work attacking police brutality, Trump’s malevolence, and systemic racism. But by 2023, those themes had become a tough sell – even to newspapers that had kept a running tally of Donald Trump’s lies throughout his wretched presidency. Papers seemed to want something less strident. Something less opinionated, on the Opinionpages.

I didn’t know whether to consider that a function of fear, or to chalk it up to editors simply being tired of all the existential dread, who just wanted to lighten things up. I’m not sure the distinction matters, to me. All the President’s Men was my first inkling of what journalism was supposed to be. Paul Conrad’s LA Times editorial cartoons were brutal and brilliant, especially to a kid like me in the 1980s. 

David Shipley’s response

David Shipley, the Post’s editorial pages editor, disagreed with Ann’s interpretation of events. He told the New York Times “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force…” and “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”

I’ve seen my work run alongside columns that dealt with the same issues before. It’s common. And a satirical column is not a replacement for an editorial cartoon. I don’t believe David Shipley considered something I’ve always found to be the case: different readers read different things.Some stick to earnest columns. Some dive straight into satirical columns. But others – especially young people like I was in the 1980s – only open the opinion page for the editorial cartoons. Editorial cartoons are an introduction to journalism, for young people and for those whose eyes gloss over when they see paragraph after paragraph of prose. Covering the same matter with three different types of journalism is not redundant, it’s reach-out.

Open the link to finish reading this provocative essay.