The view from here…
Continental Features, obviously, has every right to drop Doonesbury from its syndicated Sunday comics section for any reason whatsoever or for no reason. “Just ‘cuz” is good enough.
But I found this bit in today’s article by Editor & Publisher very amusing:
As previously reported, Star Publisher H. Brandt Ayers e-mailed [Continental Features President Van] Wilkerson to say he and his paper’s editors “strongly object to an obviously political effort to silence a minority point of view. For years, my New Deal father bore the opposition views of Orphan Annie and Daddy Warbucks, and I believe he would have fought an effort to silence them a by a simple majority vote. This is wrong, offensive to First Amendment freedoms.”
Minority point of view? What gated country club does this guy call home?
The merits of a syndicator making a business decision to disassociate itself from a controversial product aside, on what basis do you conclude that Gary Trudeau’s views as expressed in the Doonesbury strip are shared by a majority of Americans? Doonesbury is, and has been for as long as I can remember, an editorial cartoon masquerading as an entertainment strip. I see Trudeau as the cartooning equivalent of Michael Moore.
However much money Farenheit 9/11 has made, or however many newspapers run Doonesbury, I find it hard to see a case that their views are typical of most Americans or that they represent a majority view.
As for this quote, “What gated country club does this guy call home?”, I say, look at the red-state/blue-state map from the last election and ask yourself, “How many voters in Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, etc. live in gated communities?”
Perhaps you need to take yourself outside the “gated community” of academia in order to get a better sense of what a “majority” is. Map the county-by-county votes for Vice President Gore in the 2000 election and you will find that they largely correspond to major metropolitan areas where the gated communities are located. You won’t find them in southwestern Virginia.
While I admit that a sizeable number of my fellow citizens are antipathetic to the current Administration, the only poll that counts will be conducted in November. At that point those who care enough to register their opinion will tell us what it is. I will be surprised if the 2004 election is very much different from the 2000 election. That is to say I don’t think we will see a majority vote for either candidate (after all, no one has been elected by a majority of votes since the senior Bush in 1988), of if we do, it will be by the slimmest margin.
Charles…while I usually try to make liberal use of qualifiers, at times such words just get in the way of what I’m trying to communicate, i.e. this publisher’s grousing seems misplaced considering he thinks a liberal cartoon represents a minority point of view. Do you suppose it’s really necessary for me to explain that in this entry Trudeau is a synecdoche for a *throughly mainstream* point of view idenitfied with the Democratic Party? Hardly a “minority.”
Okay, so the “gated country club” crack was snarky. Hey, I’m allowed!
Here’s an interesting question for you (or me or anyone): What cartoons regularly published in manistream newspaper are not political? Hmmmmm…this might be fun to consider.
I’m a regular reader of these:
Doonesbury
Dilbert
Non Sequitur
Zippy
All political, IMO.
I find it laughable that a *publisher* cries censorship about a syndicate. It’s not like he can’t license the strips himself.
http://arguewithsigns.net/mt/archives/002026.html