15 ms·

The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times

234 points by tin7in 7y ago

CptFribble 7y ago
Social media isn't the problem, low-information mob behavior has always been a thing. Pretty much all of the lynchings that ever happened in the USA occurred way before Jack Dorsey was a twinkle in his father's eye. The problem is the structural flaws built into our brains. Consider vision. If I showed you a wall of visual noise with a human face somewhere in the middle, you'd likely pick out the face in an instant. That's because we have physical structures in our visual cortex that specifically filter the information coming down the optic nerve for human faces. What's funny is that higher judgement seems to work the same way. For most of the history of homo sapiens, we've lived in relatively small groups, and only interacted with comparatively limited amounts of information (compared to the typical internet feed). Think about all the things represented by scrolling down instagram: products and their place in your life, hundreds of people you've met over many years, trends and fads and memes which are themselves complex multi-layered ideas requiring lots of insider knowledge to grasp. All of this is way more information than what a typical person had to deal with until about 100 years ago at the earliest. So what's a brain to do? Our minds filter the incoming information until it's distilled down to the simplest possible version, the one with little nuance and zero subtlety. That's the idea that catches, because we lack the machinery to process 10,000 minor details for every little thing we do all the time. Apply this to political discourse and you'll see why major political candidates spend precious minutes arguing over whether "socialism is bad," or "capitalism is bad." I'm sure many here understand it's way more complicated than that, but if you tried to get a real discussion going about nit-picky policy stuff, it'd go nowhere. I'm not about to decry "attention spans these days" or anything, because frankly I don't think people are any different than they were 500 years ago, not really. And that's the problem. The only thing that's changed is what amounts to "common knowledge" these days, which is usually also an oversimplification of scientific reality. The problem is that the world is just too big and too complex for our ill-adapted chimp brains to fully grasp, at least at the population scale, and Twitter and the like amplify this effect. I don't have any solutions. But I know that we should keep doing the one thing humans are good at: building better tools. We can't exactly make society less complex, but we can probably make tools to understand it without losing (as much) nuance. That's the only option I can see for fixing this sort of thing in the near-future, because even if these social media problems created selection pressure on humans (which I doubt), it'd be a long long time before we were cranking out baby Homo Interneticus.
vlozc 7y ago
I thought they had to close because they ripped off a Ziggy.
starik36 7y ago
The decision to no longer have political cartoons reminds me of something from earlier days. Someone at the multinational I worked at did a prod a deployment and it went pretty badly. There was downtime of about 15-20 minutes. So immediately an edict comes from up high - we shall never have deployment during hours of x to y. Just massive CYA. The guy isn't wrong about twitter mobs mowing down everything in their path and that's stupid. But he is speaking about it now, when it affected him. He had a great podium - should have said something when it was directed at someone he didn't like.
- sgift 7y ago
  > The guy isn't wrong about twitter mobs mowing down everything in their path and that's stupid. But he is speaking about it now, when it affected him. He had a great podium - should have said something when it was directed at someone he didn't like. Seems like he did. From the post: > Over the last years, with the Cartooning for Peace Foundation we established with French cartoonist Plantu and the late Kofi Annan - a great defender of cartoons - or on the board of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, I have consistently warned about the dangers of those sudden (and often organized) backlashes that carry everything in their path.
  - starik36 7y ago
    Ahhh, you are right. My bad. Good catch.
- Bakary 7y ago
  I don't think people can be blamed for only having an interest in things when affected by it. There's only so much time and energy available to each of us.
mamurphy 7y ago
Relevant tweet that links to this same article and has a self-referential political cartoon: https://twitter.com/PatChappatte/status/1138145415604449280 https://twitter.com/PatChappatte/status/1138145415604449280 The linked article is currently down for me, as is the Google cache; does anyone have a mirror? I presume the article explains the Netanyahu cartoon that the tweet references. My hot take without (being able to be) reading the article: No more political humor because of an internet mob seems like quite the shame.
heegemcgee 7y ago
Wayback Machine cache: http://web.archive.org/web/20190610203116/https://www.chappatte.com/en/the-end-of-political-cartoons-at-the-new-york-times/ http://web.archive.org/web/20190610203116/https://www.chappa...
unethical_ban 7y ago
Was there an announcement by the New York Times to do this? I am not calling him into question; I just wonder with what silence and shame they have made this decision. Should they next ban their op-eds for their sometimes offensive ideas expressed?
dlivingston 7y ago
"We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in." This is a significant problem, not just for newsrooms, but for companies and individuals. Nuance is not permitted in 2019 - this is simply the latest flavor of puritanical outrage that grips humanity. From the Salem witch trials to the Red Scare to the Harry Potter book burnings of the early 2000s, we are now privy to the latest incarnation of something as old as homo sapiens themselves. The issue now is that the puritanical outrage stretches past the pulpit and Letters to the Editor and directly into your notifications, your DMs, your timeline; broadcast across the world and sending newsrooms and corporations scrambling with half-arsed apologies.
- gfodor 7y ago
  It does confuse me that these mobs have such power on decision makers at companies and media outlets like this. The interesting thing about Twitter "mobs" is that if you look away from the computer screen or hit the button on the side of your phone, they are suddenly silent and may as well not exist. You can, in fact, log out of Twitter and never log back in again. Most of the time doing so will have zero long term negative impact, since the mob is fickle, trapped in their filter bubbles, and will move onto the next outrage in days if not hours. The mobs that cause doxing or have credible threats of harm upon on individuals (like job loss or even violence) do in fact wield incredible, terrifying power though.
  - the_snooze 7y ago
    Is there really much of a difference between the two? A sufficiently large angry only mob is bound to have at least a couple people who are willing to take things too far.
  - _vertigo 7y ago
    What is confusing? Even if you yourself log out of Twitter, other people are still looking at it. In that sense, they don't cease to exist when you put your phone down, because other people are still paying attention to them. Sure, as long as they don't know who you are, then it's not such a big deal. An online mob that's mad at you but doesn't know who you are is easy enough to ignore - just log out, as you said. But increasingly it feels like it is less and less likely that the mob does not know who you are. A Twitter mob knows that its outrage is for naught unless it can cause lasting harm to its target, and so it goes to great efforts to dox those targets. Almost always, it seems, the target is doxxed and then their life is ripped to shreds.
mAEStro-paNDa 7y ago
Here's an article over the cartoon mentioned here that sparked outrage in April which led to this: https://nypost.com/2019/04/28/new-york-times-condemned-for-anti-semitic-netanyahu-trump-cartoon/ https://nypost.com/2019/04/28/new-york-times-condemned-for-a...
- nerpderp82 7y ago
  Can someone explain how the cartoon is antisemetic? Calling it such doesn't make it so. If I blend Putin into a Cassowary crossed with a Peacock would it not be apropos? Cartoons are supposed to be edgy and uncomfortable. It looks like like the NYT succumbed to the mob whipped up by the Trump administration, it meerly doesn't want the criticism.
  - Chlatstibur 7y ago
    I would recommend this article [1] that explains the background of why the cartoon is problematic. For an analogy: Drawing Trump as a banana eating ape would not raise eyes, while drawing Obama like this undoubtedly would. [1] https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/285781/soviet-anti-semitic-cartoons https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/285781/sov...
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    Showing a non-Jewish world leader in a yarmulke put it a bit over the top for me. I think the star of David was fair game because it's a symbol of Israel as a country, but depicting Trump as some sort of crypto-Jew felt like imagery you'd see in Nazi propaganda or an illustrated version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
    - ikeyany 7y ago
      The idea is that Trump is working for Israel. What in the world is a crypto-Jew? Does it use a blockchain?
      - dbcurtis 7y ago
hestefisk 7y ago
This reminds me of the famous Muhammad drawings in 2005 in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (JP). Back then they were seen as a defence of free speech and our democratic rights, a way of mocking the draconian regimes of the Middle East. Had it happened again today, the Puritan twittersphere would have been all over it and JP would likely have had to follow same route as NYT. Very sad.
- praneshp 7y ago
  > Back then they were seen as a defence of free speech and our democratic rights, a way of mocking the draconian regimes of the Middle East Was this an universal viewpoint in the West? As a non-Muslim teen in India I saw it as mocking Islam (I get that others' mileage varies).
  - cm2187 7y ago
    In the case of Charlie Hebdo the intention was clearly to mock Islam indeed. But I am mystified that we are questioning in 2019 the right to blasphemy in a modern, western, free, secular society.
    - Bakary 7y ago
      If publishing a cartoon causes your death I think the mockery may well have been legitimate.
      - devoply 7y ago
        Well the point is to protect founding myths because at the time of the invention of said myths they were very weak. And yeah if your myths can't survive criticism, maybe your myths are not worth believing in.
      - rchaud 7y ago
        Was there some Vatican-equivalent Islamic body that commissioned a hit on the CH offices? No, it was a terrorist cell that wanted to attain both easy publicity and make life worse for European Muslims. "Legitimate" mockery would have exposed the absurdity of terrorist groups recruiting petty criminals and elevating them to a noble "jihadi" status because, well, nobody else had as little to lose. But that wouldn't get any media coverage, nor would it get props for "upholding free speech", in a country that outlaws Holocaust denial.
IdontRememberIt 7y ago
A few weeks before that event, he was on Swiss TV (he lives in Geneva) saying that he never felt pressure and did not care... Sad...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
donohoe 7y ago
To be clear, the NYT never did a lot of cartoons nor was it known for them. I really don’t think this is a big deal. If The New Yorker or sone other publication did, then maybe.
- colpabar 7y ago
  My issue isn't that they no longer have political cartoons, it's why they made the decision to remove them. And to be fair, we don't know yet. I haven't found an official statement from the NYT on this; I've only seen tweets and this guy's piece on it.
  - donohoe 7y ago
    There is no ‘official’ Statement because this isn’t a big deal. This is in the realm of deciding what freelances to go with given budgets and other factors. To this guy, this decision is clearly significant. For someone at NYT it was just another Tuesday.
mevile 7y ago
Political cartoons are, in my opinion, reductionist garbage that fail to take into consideration nuance and complexity and context. The caricature that inflate the size of ears and chins and lips and noses is not dignifying and doesn't add any value to whatever argument is being made, and can sometimes even be racist. There's no rebuttal to a political cartoon, there's no dialogue. They're cheap and easy to make and easy to consume and are just as easy to forget. I don't care if they exist or not, either way I don't read them, but standing up for political cartoons as being a thing worth defending, I don't think it is. I think they hurt more than they help. Go look at political cartoons from the sides of opinions you disagree with and see how they make you feel. Are they convincing you of anything or are they just making you mad?
- Hoasi 7y ago
  > Political cartoons are, in my opinion, reductionist garbage that fail to take into consideration nuance and complexity and context. Not the good ones. As with everything, the good ones are rare and difficult. On occasions, the form even raises to an art form. Also, the point of a good political cartoon is usually not to influence of skew your opinion.
  - awithrow 7y ago
    Do you have some examples of good ones? I tend to agree with the parent but would like to see examples of the contrary.
- ikeyany 7y ago
  > either way I don't read them, but standing up for political cartoons as being a thing worth defending, I don't think it is. I think they hurt more than they help. I don't understand how you can understand their effects without reading them. What exactly brings you to this conclusion?
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  "Political cartoons are, in my opinion, reductionist garbage that fail to take into consideration nuance and complexity and context. " They don't have to. They can just be stupid and funny (to some) as well, that's fine too.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pgodzin 7y ago
> This is the era of images. In a world of short attention span, their power has never been so big. Given the reach of social media with respect to images, cartoons, memes, etc, do we need newspapers to be the distributors of political cartoons? Does it simply add legitimacy to some cartoons to separate them from the huge amount of low quality social media content?
NE2z2T9qi 7y ago
I think this piece is a great example of smug, establishment romanticism which grossly overvalues form over function. A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh, think deeply, or--most importantly--change my worldview in years. It's the most self-satisfied, pretentious, and outdated medium I know of. The author's notion that the loss of political cartoons is a serious loss of visual political culture is a self-absorbed joke. Visual political memes have become a massive and persistent grassroots social phenomenon with far more influence and engagement than too-clever-by-half political cartoons... not to mention certain animated shows with extremely sharp political and social satire. I don't think the author really regrets loss of political discourse. I think he regrets no longer being considered part of the political chattering-class establishment, even as that establishment loses its influence in a world of democratized information flow and opinion-sharing.
- number_six 7y ago
  I would recommend Bruce McKinnon - he's great https://www.artizans.com/browse.htm?artist=2 https://www.artizans.com/browse.htm?artist=2
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  >>A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh or think deeply in years. This probably says more about you than about political cartoons as a medium. Is it possible that you have become so used to over-the-top memes and shallow animated shows with instant-gratification "satire" that you have lost the ability (and/or patience) to pause and ponder the subtler, many-layered messages underneath traditional cartoons?
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    Could you post one of these alleged subtle and multi-layered political cartoons, with a short analysis?
    - probably_wrong 7y ago
      I learned last month that there's a Pulitzer price in Editorial Cartooning. This is the winner of 2019 (and the runner ups), so I'd say that's as good as it gets: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/darrin-bell-freelancer https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/darrin-bell-freelancer
ehvatum 7y ago
The drastic step of eliminating all political cartoons carries a very specific and misleading implication, if one assumes that the NYT is impartial. Which they are not: https://nypost.com/2019/04/30/anti-semitic-scandal-at-the-new-york-times-isnt-surprising/ https://nypost.com/2019/04/30/anti-semitic-scandal-at-the-ne... With that in mind, ceasing publication of all political cartoons evidences extremely poor editorial discretion at the NYT. What, they are incapable of excluding Palestinian propaganda? Apparently: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/middleeast/christmas-lebanon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/middleeast/christma...
- ehvatum 7y ago
  To elaborate on my comment, by eliminating all cartoons, the NYT invites one to think that politically correct over-sensitivity is the cause. Otherwise, why would they not simply avoid publishing anti-Semitic cartoons? Indeed, the author of the blog post suggests that "Twitter mobs" are at fault. But the NYT has an extensive, dark history of profoundly harmful anti-Semitism, including the editorial stance that the Holocaust was not occurring, as it occurred. This is extensively detailed in Buried by the Times, and is supported by that book's absolutely mammoth bibliography: https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Times-Holocaust-Important-Newspaper/dp/0521607825 https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Times-Holocaust-Important-News...
kristianc 7y ago
> "We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in." It's strange, and perhaps unfortunate, that having pinned the blame on "Twitter Mobs", the examples he chooses to give are where cartoonists have been silenced by autocratic regimes (Turkey, Venezuela, Russia). The solution in these cases is to push back and defend press freedom, not to cave in and blame faceless social media mobs. And when it comes to 'social media' mobs, is anyone really going to come into bat for the NYT and claim that the below is not really anti-semitic or homophobic? If you need to lean on anti-Semitic or homophobic tropes let me suggest you're not as funny, incisive or subversive as you think you are. Comparing yourself to CH in such circumstances is to claim a martrydom you don't really deserve [1] [2] [1] https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemitic-cartoon-roundly-condemned/ https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemi... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump-putin-cartoon-criticized-homophobic-n891811 https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump...
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
  >https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemitic-cartoon-roundly-condemned/ https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemi... Criticising Israel and pro-Israel policy != antisemitism >https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump-putin-cartoon-criticized-homophobic-n891811 https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump... I don't see how it's homophobic. The cartoon portrays Trump and Putin as lovers, supposedly to mock their alleged closeness. It doesn't attack homosexual people. If the cartoon were portraying e.g. Merkel and Putin, in similar roles, would you call it "heterophobic" (is that a word?), or would it be perfectly acceptable?
  - legostormtroopr 7y ago
    > The cartoon portrays Trump and Putin as lovers, supposedly to mock their alleged closeness. It doesn't attack homosexual people. It does attack homosexual people. You can't use "gay" as a slur or as a punchline to a joke anymore. The punchline of the joke isn't "they're close", its "they're so close they're gay". That makes "being gay" an active of derision or humour, which is an attack on gay people.
hybrids 7y ago
This seems less like a case the "oh, the PC Police want to do away with political humor!" and more just shifting tides in media - i.e. that the conventional newspaper political cartoon is a form trending towards obsolescence. Political comedy is very much alive, at least in terms of its popularity and range across the political spectrum, attracting from the far left (e.g. Chapo Trap House) to liberals (e.g. most late night hosts) to all your various forms of conservatives (e.g. Crowder). To me the "political cartoon" as we once knew it seems like a dated formula, one that might be argued has already been replaced by the format of internet memes which can serve similar political function. (Also personally I have never really cared for political cartoons, they've always seemed unfunny and too reductionist. Although I suppose the Stan Kelly Cartoons from The Onion might be an exception.)
enterx 7y ago
This is what you get when you let the mob rule.
babyslothzoo 7y ago
How depressing.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
stickfigure 7y ago
The actual cartoon, in case anyone (like me) is missing context: https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-deeply-sorry-for-anti-semitic-cartoon-of-netanyahu-and-trump/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-deeply-sorry-for-anti...
- Balgair 7y ago
  Thanks! Overall, this seems fairly tame to me. What am I missing? I'm honestly at a loss here.
  - humanrebar 7y ago
    It plays into a lot of anti-Semitic tropes. Imagine a cartoon of a black leader depicting him as a dumb violent ape with big lips.
  - frittig 7y ago
    it reminds people of this https://mobile.twitter.com/kishkushkay/status/1122290507714113538 https://mobile.twitter.com/kishkushkay/status/11222905077141...
    - apexalpha 7y ago
      The first pic has a stereotypical Jew up front the second the prime minister of a country that is highly influential of US foreign policy. I think the comparison is stretch. It seems that any cartoon on Israel will simply be marked 'anti-Semitic' by opponents.
  - hnick 7y ago
    Caricatures that exaggerate various racial features are fairly risky these days. I have no idea if they stepped over the line here, but you get away with a lot less than you could in the past.
100100010001 7y ago
The New York Times is the best paper in the world? Sounds like an absolute without any parameters or qualifiers...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
timtim51251 7y ago
More proof that liberals destroy everything. Some people on here can't afford a nice steak but are more than willing to pay more and more taxes and the only skill they have is self sabotaging their own life and taking away their own freedom. These are the same people who think they are so smart and think they are so educated. The same people will soon pay a tax for living and breathing because even that adds to global warming. They want to be poorer and live on the street. America went from a country where EVERYONE could afford a house even if they were paid minimum wage and had a single income. Now most can't even with a 6 figure job. Nice job guys, you've destroyed the country and now you want to make things worse. All emotions, zero common sense or critical thinking skills, that's MOST Americans.
- iron0013 7y ago
  What does any of that have to do with the article?
RickJWagner 7y ago
Yes, this. Politically correct mobs are changing the world for the worst. In today's world, Eddie Murphy wouldn't make it out the door. And we would be worse off for it. The great irony is that the very comedians who are being retroactively condemned were cutting-edge for breaking barriers in their day. John Cleese is a glaring example. I have high hopes the pendulum will some day swing back the other way, and we will all be able to laugh at today's overzealous critics.
- smsm42 7y ago
  It it not just irony, it is on purpose. The PC party has largely captured the media, the academy and the polite society. There are still some local resistance here and there, but in a large measure they won this round of cultural war. So they do not need any troublemakers anymore, they don't want people that constantly test and push the boundaries of acceptable and reveal the absurdity of power and the nakedness of the kings. They are setting the boundaries now, they are the power and they are the kings - why would they tolerate some jackasses questioning what they have struggled so long to achieve? They done their part in the revolution, now to the re-education camps with them! If you read the history of any recent revolution, you'd see this pattern repeated over and over.
b_tterc_p 7y ago
Non political comic about political comics that I think about sums up the value of political comics (language warning, I guess) http://smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-07-02 http://smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-07-02
rdiddly 7y ago
So the Times was like "Hey everybody we found the problem: It's the fact that we have political cartoons?"
fitnesshealth 7y ago
The New York Times announced on Monday that it would no longer publish daily political cartoons in its international edition and ended its relationship with two contract cartoonists. In a statement, James Bennet, editorial page editor, said The Times was “very grateful for and proud of” the work that the cartoonists, Patrick Chappatte and Heng Kim Song, had done for the international edition over the years.
TomMckenny 7y ago
The article raises a very important point but unless I'm missing something, the comments here are identical to the twitter mob being talked about. Are not statements quickly ripped of in a heat of emotion and consisting solely of impressions, rumors, opinions, hyperbole and intentional bias exactly the problem?
Fjolsvith 7y ago
I am mildly curious if the recent publication of Mark Levin's "Unfreedom of the Press" has any bearing on the changes happening at NYT.

234 points by tin7in 7y ago

Social media isn't the problem, low-information mob behavior has always been a thing. Pretty much all of the lynchings that ever happened in the USA occurred way before Jack Dorsey was a twinkle in his father's eye. The problem is the structural flaws built into our brains. Consider vision. If I showed you a wall of visual noise with a human face somewhere in the middle, you'd likely pick out the face in an instant. That's because we have physical structures in our visual cortex that specifically filter the information coming down the optic nerve for human faces. What's funny is that higher judgement seems to work the same way. For most of the history of homo sapiens, we've lived in relatively small groups, and only interacted with comparatively limited amounts of information (compared to the typical internet feed). Think about all the things represented by scrolling down instagram: products and their place in your life, hundreds of people you've met over many years, trends and fads and memes which are themselves complex multi-layered ideas requiring lots of insider knowledge to grasp. All of this is way more information than what a typical person had to deal with until about 100 years ago at the earliest. So what's a brain to do? Our minds filter the incoming information until it's distilled down to the simplest possible version, the one with little nuance and zero subtlety. That's the idea that catches, because we lack the machinery to process 10,000 minor details for every little thing we do all the time. Apply this to political discourse and you'll see why major political candidates spend precious minutes arguing over whether "socialism is bad," or "capitalism is bad." I'm sure many here understand it's way more complicated than that, but if you tried to get a real discussion going about nit-picky policy stuff, it'd go nowhere. I'm not about to decry "attention spans these days" or anything, because frankly I don't think people are any different than they were 500 years ago, not really. And that's the problem. The only thing that's changed is what amounts to "common knowledge" these days, which is usually also an oversimplification of scientific reality. The problem is that the world is just too big and too complex for our ill-adapted chimp brains to fully grasp, at least at the population scale, and Twitter and the like amplify this effect. I don't have any solutions. But I know that we should keep doing the one thing humans are good at: building better tools. We can't exactly make society less complex, but we can probably make tools to understand it without losing (as much) nuance. That's the only option I can see for fixing this sort of thing in the near-future, because even if these social media problems created selection pressure on humans (which I doubt), it'd be a long long time before we were cranking out baby Homo Interneticus.

vlozc 7y ago

I thought they had to close because they ripped off a Ziggy.

starik36 7y ago

The decision to no longer have political cartoons reminds me of something from earlier days. Someone at the multinational I worked at did a prod a deployment and it went pretty badly. There was downtime of about 15-20 minutes. So immediately an edict comes from up high - we shall never have deployment during hours of x to y. Just massive CYA. The guy isn't wrong about twitter mobs mowing down everything in their path and that's stupid. But he is speaking about it now, when it affected him. He had a great podium - should have said something when it was directed at someone he didn't like.

sgift 7y ago
> The guy isn't wrong about twitter mobs mowing down everything in their path and that's stupid. But he is speaking about it now, when it affected him. He had a great podium - should have said something when it was directed at someone he didn't like. Seems like he did. From the post: > Over the last years, with the Cartooning for Peace Foundation we established with French cartoonist Plantu and the late Kofi Annan - a great defender of cartoons - or on the board of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, I have consistently warned about the dangers of those sudden (and often organized) backlashes that carry everything in their path.
- starik36 7y ago
  Ahhh, you are right. My bad. Good catch.
Bakary 7y ago
I don't think people can be blamed for only having an interest in things when affected by it. There's only so much time and energy available to each of us.

mamurphy 7y ago

Relevant tweet that links to this same article and has a self-referential political cartoon: https://twitter.com/PatChappatte/status/1138145415604449280 https://twitter.com/PatChappatte/status/1138145415604449280 The linked article is currently down for me, as is the Google cache; does anyone have a mirror? I presume the article explains the Netanyahu cartoon that the tweet references. My hot take without (being able to be) reading the article: No more political humor because of an internet mob seems like quite the shame.

heegemcgee 7y ago

Wayback Machine cache: http://web.archive.org/web/20190610203116/https://www.chappatte.com/en/the-end-of-political-cartoons-at-the-new-york-times/ http://web.archive.org/web/20190610203116/https://www.chappa...

unethical_ban 7y ago

Was there an announcement by the New York Times to do this? I am not calling him into question; I just wonder with what silence and shame they have made this decision. Should they next ban their op-eds for their sometimes offensive ideas expressed?

dlivingston 7y ago

"We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in." This is a significant problem, not just for newsrooms, but for companies and individuals. Nuance is not permitted in 2019 - this is simply the latest flavor of puritanical outrage that grips humanity. From the Salem witch trials to the Red Scare to the Harry Potter book burnings of the early 2000s, we are now privy to the latest incarnation of something as old as homo sapiens themselves. The issue now is that the puritanical outrage stretches past the pulpit and Letters to the Editor and directly into your notifications, your DMs, your timeline; broadcast across the world and sending newsrooms and corporations scrambling with half-arsed apologies.

gfodor 7y ago
It does confuse me that these mobs have such power on decision makers at companies and media outlets like this. The interesting thing about Twitter "mobs" is that if you look away from the computer screen or hit the button on the side of your phone, they are suddenly silent and may as well not exist. You can, in fact, log out of Twitter and never log back in again. Most of the time doing so will have zero long term negative impact, since the mob is fickle, trapped in their filter bubbles, and will move onto the next outrage in days if not hours. The mobs that cause doxing or have credible threats of harm upon on individuals (like job loss or even violence) do in fact wield incredible, terrifying power though.
- the_snooze 7y ago
  Is there really much of a difference between the two? A sufficiently large angry only mob is bound to have at least a couple people who are willing to take things too far.
- _vertigo 7y ago
  What is confusing? Even if you yourself log out of Twitter, other people are still looking at it. In that sense, they don't cease to exist when you put your phone down, because other people are still paying attention to them. Sure, as long as they don't know who you are, then it's not such a big deal. An online mob that's mad at you but doesn't know who you are is easy enough to ignore - just log out, as you said. But increasingly it feels like it is less and less likely that the mob does not know who you are. A Twitter mob knows that its outrage is for naught unless it can cause lasting harm to its target, and so it goes to great efforts to dox those targets. Almost always, it seems, the target is doxxed and then their life is ripped to shreds.

mAEStro-paNDa 7y ago

Here's an article over the cartoon mentioned here that sparked outrage in April which led to this: https://nypost.com/2019/04/28/new-york-times-condemned-for-anti-semitic-netanyahu-trump-cartoon/ https://nypost.com/2019/04/28/new-york-times-condemned-for-a...

nerpderp82 7y ago
Can someone explain how the cartoon is antisemetic? Calling it such doesn't make it so. If I blend Putin into a Cassowary crossed with a Peacock would it not be apropos? Cartoons are supposed to be edgy and uncomfortable. It looks like like the NYT succumbed to the mob whipped up by the Trump administration, it meerly doesn't want the criticism.
- Chlatstibur 7y ago
  I would recommend this article [1] that explains the background of why the cartoon is problematic. For an analogy: Drawing Trump as a banana eating ape would not raise eyes, while drawing Obama like this undoubtedly would. [1] https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/285781/soviet-anti-semitic-cartoons https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/285781/sov...
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  Showing a non-Jewish world leader in a yarmulke put it a bit over the top for me. I think the star of David was fair game because it's a symbol of Israel as a country, but depicting Trump as some sort of crypto-Jew felt like imagery you'd see in Nazi propaganda or an illustrated version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
  - ikeyany 7y ago
    The idea is that Trump is working for Israel. What in the world is a crypto-Jew? Does it use a blockchain?
    - dbcurtis 7y ago

hestefisk 7y ago

This reminds me of the famous Muhammad drawings in 2005 in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (JP). Back then they were seen as a defence of free speech and our democratic rights, a way of mocking the draconian regimes of the Middle East. Had it happened again today, the Puritan twittersphere would have been all over it and JP would likely have had to follow same route as NYT. Very sad.

praneshp 7y ago
> Back then they were seen as a defence of free speech and our democratic rights, a way of mocking the draconian regimes of the Middle East Was this an universal viewpoint in the West? As a non-Muslim teen in India I saw it as mocking Islam (I get that others' mileage varies).
- cm2187 7y ago
  In the case of Charlie Hebdo the intention was clearly to mock Islam indeed. But I am mystified that we are questioning in 2019 the right to blasphemy in a modern, western, free, secular society.
  - Bakary 7y ago
    If publishing a cartoon causes your death I think the mockery may well have been legitimate.
    - devoply 7y ago
      Well the point is to protect founding myths because at the time of the invention of said myths they were very weak. And yeah if your myths can't survive criticism, maybe your myths are not worth believing in.
    - rchaud 7y ago
      Was there some Vatican-equivalent Islamic body that commissioned a hit on the CH offices? No, it was a terrorist cell that wanted to attain both easy publicity and make life worse for European Muslims. "Legitimate" mockery would have exposed the absurdity of terrorist groups recruiting petty criminals and elevating them to a noble "jihadi" status because, well, nobody else had as little to lose. But that wouldn't get any media coverage, nor would it get props for "upholding free speech", in a country that outlaws Holocaust denial.

IdontRememberIt 7y ago

A few weeks before that event, he was on Swiss TV (he lives in Geneva) saying that he never felt pressure and did not care... Sad...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

donohoe 7y ago

To be clear, the NYT never did a lot of cartoons nor was it known for them. I really don’t think this is a big deal. If The New Yorker or sone other publication did, then maybe.

colpabar 7y ago
My issue isn't that they no longer have political cartoons, it's why they made the decision to remove them. And to be fair, we don't know yet. I haven't found an official statement from the NYT on this; I've only seen tweets and this guy's piece on it.
- donohoe 7y ago
  There is no ‘official’ Statement because this isn’t a big deal. This is in the realm of deciding what freelances to go with given budgets and other factors. To this guy, this decision is clearly significant. For someone at NYT it was just another Tuesday.

mevile 7y ago

Political cartoons are, in my opinion, reductionist garbage that fail to take into consideration nuance and complexity and context. The caricature that inflate the size of ears and chins and lips and noses is not dignifying and doesn't add any value to whatever argument is being made, and can sometimes even be racist. There's no rebuttal to a political cartoon, there's no dialogue. They're cheap and easy to make and easy to consume and are just as easy to forget. I don't care if they exist or not, either way I don't read them, but standing up for political cartoons as being a thing worth defending, I don't think it is. I think they hurt more than they help. Go look at political cartoons from the sides of opinions you disagree with and see how they make you feel. Are they convincing you of anything or are they just making you mad?

Hoasi 7y ago
> Political cartoons are, in my opinion, reductionist garbage that fail to take into consideration nuance and complexity and context. Not the good ones. As with everything, the good ones are rare and difficult. On occasions, the form even raises to an art form. Also, the point of a good political cartoon is usually not to influence of skew your opinion.
- awithrow 7y ago
  Do you have some examples of good ones? I tend to agree with the parent but would like to see examples of the contrary.
ikeyany 7y ago
> either way I don't read them, but standing up for political cartoons as being a thing worth defending, I don't think it is. I think they hurt more than they help. I don't understand how you can understand their effects without reading them. What exactly brings you to this conclusion?
sonnyblarney 7y ago
"Political cartoons are, in my opinion, reductionist garbage that fail to take into consideration nuance and complexity and context. " They don't have to. They can just be stupid and funny (to some) as well, that's fine too.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

pgodzin 7y ago

> This is the era of images. In a world of short attention span, their power has never been so big. Given the reach of social media with respect to images, cartoons, memes, etc, do we need newspapers to be the distributors of political cartoons? Does it simply add legitimacy to some cartoons to separate them from the huge amount of low quality social media content?

NE2z2T9qi 7y ago

I think this piece is a great example of smug, establishment romanticism which grossly overvalues form over function. A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh, think deeply, or--most importantly--change my worldview in years. It's the most self-satisfied, pretentious, and outdated medium I know of. The author's notion that the loss of political cartoons is a serious loss of visual political culture is a self-absorbed joke. Visual political memes have become a massive and persistent grassroots social phenomenon with far more influence and engagement than too-clever-by-half political cartoons... not to mention certain animated shows with extremely sharp political and social satire. I don't think the author really regrets loss of political discourse. I think he regrets no longer being considered part of the political chattering-class establishment, even as that establishment loses its influence in a world of democratized information flow and opinion-sharing.

number_six 7y ago
I would recommend Bruce McKinnon - he's great https://www.artizans.com/browse.htm?artist=2 https://www.artizans.com/browse.htm?artist=2
enraged_camel 7y ago
>>A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh or think deeply in years. This probably says more about you than about political cartoons as a medium. Is it possible that you have become so used to over-the-top memes and shallow animated shows with instant-gratification "satire" that you have lost the ability (and/or patience) to pause and ponder the subtler, many-layered messages underneath traditional cartoons?
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  Could you post one of these alleged subtle and multi-layered political cartoons, with a short analysis?
  - probably_wrong 7y ago
    I learned last month that there's a Pulitzer price in Editorial Cartooning. This is the winner of 2019 (and the runner ups), so I'd say that's as good as it gets: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/darrin-bell-freelancer https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/darrin-bell-freelancer

ehvatum 7y ago

The drastic step of eliminating all political cartoons carries a very specific and misleading implication, if one assumes that the NYT is impartial. Which they are not: https://nypost.com/2019/04/30/anti-semitic-scandal-at-the-new-york-times-isnt-surprising/ https://nypost.com/2019/04/30/anti-semitic-scandal-at-the-ne... With that in mind, ceasing publication of all political cartoons evidences extremely poor editorial discretion at the NYT. What, they are incapable of excluding Palestinian propaganda? Apparently: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/middleeast/christmas-lebanon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/middleeast/christma...

ehvatum 7y ago
To elaborate on my comment, by eliminating all cartoons, the NYT invites one to think that politically correct over-sensitivity is the cause. Otherwise, why would they not simply avoid publishing anti-Semitic cartoons? Indeed, the author of the blog post suggests that "Twitter mobs" are at fault. But the NYT has an extensive, dark history of profoundly harmful anti-Semitism, including the editorial stance that the Holocaust was not occurring, as it occurred. This is extensively detailed in Buried by the Times, and is supported by that book's absolutely mammoth bibliography: https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Times-Holocaust-Important-Newspaper/dp/0521607825 https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Times-Holocaust-Important-News...

kristianc 7y ago

> "We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in." It's strange, and perhaps unfortunate, that having pinned the blame on "Twitter Mobs", the examples he chooses to give are where cartoonists have been silenced by autocratic regimes (Turkey, Venezuela, Russia). The solution in these cases is to push back and defend press freedom, not to cave in and blame faceless social media mobs. And when it comes to 'social media' mobs, is anyone really going to come into bat for the NYT and claim that the below is not really anti-semitic or homophobic? If you need to lean on anti-Semitic or homophobic tropes let me suggest you're not as funny, incisive or subversive as you think you are. Comparing yourself to CH in such circumstances is to claim a martrydom you don't really deserve [1] [2] [1] https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemitic-cartoon-roundly-condemned/ https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemi... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump-putin-cartoon-criticized-homophobic-n891811 https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump...

xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
>https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemitic-cartoon-roundly-condemned/ https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemi... Criticising Israel and pro-Israel policy != antisemitism >https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump-putin-cartoon-criticized-homophobic-n891811 https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump... I don't see how it's homophobic. The cartoon portrays Trump and Putin as lovers, supposedly to mock their alleged closeness. It doesn't attack homosexual people. If the cartoon were portraying e.g. Merkel and Putin, in similar roles, would you call it "heterophobic" (is that a word?), or would it be perfectly acceptable?
- legostormtroopr 7y ago
  > The cartoon portrays Trump and Putin as lovers, supposedly to mock their alleged closeness. It doesn't attack homosexual people. It does attack homosexual people. You can't use "gay" as a slur or as a punchline to a joke anymore. The punchline of the joke isn't "they're close", its "they're so close they're gay". That makes "being gay" an active of derision or humour, which is an attack on gay people.

hybrids 7y ago

This seems less like a case the "oh, the PC Police want to do away with political humor!" and more just shifting tides in media - i.e. that the conventional newspaper political cartoon is a form trending towards obsolescence. Political comedy is very much alive, at least in terms of its popularity and range across the political spectrum, attracting from the far left (e.g. Chapo Trap House) to liberals (e.g. most late night hosts) to all your various forms of conservatives (e.g. Crowder). To me the "political cartoon" as we once knew it seems like a dated formula, one that might be argued has already been replaced by the format of internet memes which can serve similar political function. (Also personally I have never really cared for political cartoons, they've always seemed unfunny and too reductionist. Although I suppose the Stan Kelly Cartoons from The Onion might be an exception.)

enterx 7y ago

This is what you get when you let the mob rule.

babyslothzoo 7y ago

How depressing.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

stickfigure 7y ago

The actual cartoon, in case anyone (like me) is missing context: https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-deeply-sorry-for-anti-semitic-cartoon-of-netanyahu-and-trump/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-deeply-sorry-for-anti...

Balgair 7y ago
Thanks! Overall, this seems fairly tame to me. What am I missing? I'm honestly at a loss here.
- humanrebar 7y ago
  It plays into a lot of anti-Semitic tropes. Imagine a cartoon of a black leader depicting him as a dumb violent ape with big lips.
- frittig 7y ago
  it reminds people of this https://mobile.twitter.com/kishkushkay/status/1122290507714113538 https://mobile.twitter.com/kishkushkay/status/11222905077141...
  - apexalpha 7y ago
    The first pic has a stereotypical Jew up front the second the prime minister of a country that is highly influential of US foreign policy. I think the comparison is stretch. It seems that any cartoon on Israel will simply be marked 'anti-Semitic' by opponents.
- hnick 7y ago
  Caricatures that exaggerate various racial features are fairly risky these days. I have no idea if they stepped over the line here, but you get away with a lot less than you could in the past.

100100010001 7y ago

The New York Times is the best paper in the world? Sounds like an absolute without any parameters or qualifiers...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

timtim51251 7y ago

More proof that liberals destroy everything. Some people on here can't afford a nice steak but are more than willing to pay more and more taxes and the only skill they have is self sabotaging their own life and taking away their own freedom. These are the same people who think they are so smart and think they are so educated. The same people will soon pay a tax for living and breathing because even that adds to global warming. They want to be poorer and live on the street. America went from a country where EVERYONE could afford a house even if they were paid minimum wage and had a single income. Now most can't even with a 6 figure job. Nice job guys, you've destroyed the country and now you want to make things worse. All emotions, zero common sense or critical thinking skills, that's MOST Americans.

iron0013 7y ago
What does any of that have to do with the article?

RickJWagner 7y ago

Yes, this. Politically correct mobs are changing the world for the worst. In today's world, Eddie Murphy wouldn't make it out the door. And we would be worse off for it. The great irony is that the very comedians who are being retroactively condemned were cutting-edge for breaking barriers in their day. John Cleese is a glaring example. I have high hopes the pendulum will some day swing back the other way, and we will all be able to laugh at today's overzealous critics.

smsm42 7y ago
It it not just irony, it is on purpose. The PC party has largely captured the media, the academy and the polite society. There are still some local resistance here and there, but in a large measure they won this round of cultural war. So they do not need any troublemakers anymore, they don't want people that constantly test and push the boundaries of acceptable and reveal the absurdity of power and the nakedness of the kings. They are setting the boundaries now, they are the power and they are the kings - why would they tolerate some jackasses questioning what they have struggled so long to achieve? They done their part in the revolution, now to the re-education camps with them! If you read the history of any recent revolution, you'd see this pattern repeated over and over.

b_tterc_p 7y ago

Non political comic about political comics that I think about sums up the value of political comics (language warning, I guess) http://smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-07-02 http://smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-07-02

rdiddly 7y ago

So the Times was like "Hey everybody we found the problem: It's the fact that we have political cartoons?"

fitnesshealth 7y ago

The New York Times announced on Monday that it would no longer publish daily political cartoons in its international edition and ended its relationship with two contract cartoonists. In a statement, James Bennet, editorial page editor, said The Times was “very grateful for and proud of” the work that the cartoonists, Patrick Chappatte and Heng Kim Song, had done for the international edition over the years.

TomMckenny 7y ago

The article raises a very important point but unless I'm missing something, the comments here are identical to the twitter mob being talked about. Are not statements quickly ripped of in a heat of emotion and consisting solely of impressions, rumors, opinions, hyperbole and intentional bias exactly the problem?

Fjolsvith 7y ago

I am mildly curious if the recent publication of Mark Levin's "Unfreedom of the Press" has any bearing on the changes happening at NYT.