Another One Bites the Dust
But “progressivism” can mean whatever a newspaper wants it to, and a U-turn isn’t the same as a slow but steady change of course. About a year ago, coworkers say, Sherffius’s bosses started getting after him to tone down his more liberal cartoons. “Everybody improves by editing,” says Soeteber. “I would put [cartoonists] in the same category as columnists–nobody is 100 percent sacrosanct. I don’t believe in messing [with cartoons] except in the most extreme circumstances, but I think we all get better by giving and taking.”
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“An editorial cartoon is sort of a creative bubble,” says Matt Davies, cartoonist at the Journal News in Westchester, New York. “It takes hours to build, and if it’s right, it’s a perfect bubble. It’s unlike a column. A column you can tweak and mess with. In the ten years I’ve been doing this I’ve seen maybe three cartoons that could have been tweaked. ‘The party of fiscal restraint.’ Everybody knows that’s supposed to be the Republicans. If you put a Democrat in there you negate it. As soon as you try to dumb the thing down for the reader you kill it.”
Davies, who’s president elect of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, can’t think of another cartoonist who walked out the way Sherffius did. “It takes a lot of courage,” he says. “It takes a lot more courage to quit your job than to put out a cartoon that gets you in a lot of trouble.”
Davies is suggesting that the most important reason the Tribune hasn’t replaced MacNelly isn’t budgetary. “A big salary for a cartoonist is a rounding error for a paper like the Tribune,” he maintains. It’s that a cartoonist worthy of the Tribune would demand more freedom than the Tribune might be willing to give. “Do they really want to deal with that?” he says.
He e-mailed me: “I would expect a cartoonist to live with the same kind of scrutiny as a columnist, but I don’t expect columnists to follow the Tribune editorial line. They are entirely free to disagree with the editorial views of the paper….The op-ed page, though, presents a clash of columnists. There is only one cartoon. So I would like a cartoonist to be a good fit philosophically with the Tribune, as Jeff was. By a good fit, I mean a cartoonist who disagrees on some issues with the editorial page, but who is not constantly at war with the editorial page.”
Partying With the Enemy?
