No funny side to editors dropping Doonesbury

MEDIA & MARKETING:THE FATE of this week's Doonesbury confirms that the political cartoon is in rude health, even as political cartoonists find that newspapers, their traditional paying clients, are not.

Purveyors of the art, from a syndicated giant of the industry such as Doonesbury comic strip creator Garry Trudeau to long-serving in-house cartoonists such as the Daily Telegraph's Matt and T he Irish Times's Martyn Turner, bring humour, irreverence and relevance to broadsheet pages that otherwise err on the side of the turgid. They've got punchlines - and actual punch.

The decision of US publications to drop this week’s Doonesbury abortion-themed comic strip reflects the political climate of the “red states”. But the action of those editors also tallies with a wider trend of legacy media outlets that are fast becoming more satirised against than satirising.

No abortion takes place in Trudeau’s six-part strip. It depicts a woman invited to “take a seat in the shaming room” of a Texan clinic while she awaits a transvaginal ultrasound. The procedure is effectively now compulsory for women seeking abortions in Texas, despite being medically unnecessary, following the passing of a law by governor Rick Perry requiring doctors to play women the sound of the foetus’s heartbeat.

Some newspapers have chosen to run most of the strip but censor the fourth in the sequence, in which Trudeau equates a transvaginal ultrasound with state rape. He is not the only observer to have done so.

The editors who dropped Doonesbury – at least 55 of them, according to the Daily Cartoonist– did so despite the fact that Bills to introduce similar legislation have been proposed in other US states, and despite the fact that threats to erode reproductive rights are a prominent feature of the Republican presidential campaign. It's a running theme that's known online as the War on Women.

"Why [Rick] Santorum, [Rush] Limbaugh and [others] thought this would be a good time to declare war on half the electorate I cannot say. But to ignore it would have been comedy malpractice," Trudeau told the Washington Post.

He told AP: “The goal is definitely not to antagonise editors and get booted from papers. It’s just an occupational risk.”

In some ways it is worrying to think that, rather than simply making a cynical commercial decision to censor, media editors concur with Perry’s spokeswoman Catherine Frazier when she says: “The decision to end a life is not funny. There is nothing comic about this tasteless interpretation of legislation we have passed in Texas to ensure that women have all the facts when making a life-ending decision.”

Whatever your views on abortion, this statement perpetuates two fallacies – firstly, that cartoons are inherently a ha-ha entertainment, and secondly, that the target of the humour in Trudeau’s strip is unwanted pregnancy itself and not Perry and his very powerful friends in the Republican party.

Like any satire worthy of the name, Trudeau's intentions are entirely serious. And given Doonesbury is published by 1,400 media outlets worldwide, including The Irish Times, he is not going to go hungry anytime soon.

It is interesting that a country with no abortion rights like Ireland can publish the original free of controversy, while US states with some abortion rights are bound by a climate of censorship.

This is about more than just the limits of the US media, however. Ultimately, a publication's attitude to the importance of satire will depend on whether it believes its audience is the kind that will dip into The Onionevery now and again and find it funny, or whether it pitches itself at those Facebook users who find their blurred avatars on Literally Unbelievable, a site dedicated to people who think The Onion's headlines are for real.

Sooner or later, they will have to choose.

Shrinking print space means fledgling cartoonists are finding outlets for their talents on lower paid or non-paying websites instead. This suggests that the political cartoonists of the future are more likely to be hobbyists.

At the same time, editors who retain cartoonists on staff acknowledge that their brand benefits enormously from doing so.

"Not since the late Bill Deedes has one person been as indelibly associated with the Telegraphbrand as Matt Pritchett, known universally as Matt," the Daily Telegraphdeclared of its "pocket" cartoonist in 2008.

Columnists, feature writers, critics and many of the people most indelibly associated with newspaper brands have long been freelance contributors or contractors, who are arguably less susceptible to any Borg-like media culture that may reside within office walls. An increasing reliance on “external” contributors, however, means the “not for us” Doonesbury phenomenon is one that will likely crop up again and again.

Media outlets will race to distance themselves from easily distanced contributors who are not a perfect “fit”.

The best satirists rarely are.