Democracy - What's Cartooning Got to Do With It?

Jeff Bezos's flunkies at the Washington Post couldn't stand the heat an editorial artist applies to everyone, including her employer

Supposedly clicking the ♡ button helps boost visibility of Substack posts. So please do so if you like what I’m tryiing to do.

This is a quick pat on the back for all the editorial cartoonists out there (ever fewer, sadly), but particularly

Ann Telnaes

, the Pulitzer winner who just quit the Washington Post over the canning of her draft skewering the paper’s owner along with a batch of other billionaire and industrial media and tech titans for genuflecting to President-elect Trump.

If you haven’t subscribed to Ann’s Substack dispatch, now’s the time. That’s where she broke the news about quitting, and where she explained that while most such cartoons center on humor, this is no laughing matter:

Over the years I have watched my overseas colleagues risk their livelihoods and sometimes even their lives to expose injustices and hold their countries’ leaders accountable. As a member of the Advisory board for the Geneva based Freedom Cartoonists Foundation and a former board member of Cartoonists Rights, I believe that editorial cartoonists are vital for civic debate and have an essential role in journalism.

There will be people who say, “Hey, you work for a company and that company has the right to expect employees to adhere to what’s good for the company”. That’s true except we’re talking about news organizations that have public obligations and who are obliged to nurture a free press in a democracy. Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press— and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press.

It might seem a minor thing for Bezos’s flunkies to cancel this art, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Click back to Telnaes’s 2019 illustrated essay on cartoonists as democracy’s “canaries in the coal mine” to learn more. Here are the opening and closing frames.

The opening and closing frames from an Ann Telnaes illustrated essay on the importance of political art in democracies.

The full artwork is here:

The canaries aren't doing well

I first came to appreciate her work 20 years ago, while covering the climate policies of the George W. Bush administration for The New York Times. With help from a long-serving government functionary, Rick Piltz, I’d broken the story that a former oil lobbyist, Phil Cooney, had softened the findings of congressionally-mandated climate reports. Cooney resigned and, shortly afterward, got hired by ExxonMobil. Telnaes went to work and then sent me a signed copy of one result.

For some reason, hardly anyone clicks links in Substack posts but here’s the Times timeline of my stories.

There are plenty of other gutsy editorial cartoonists out there who deserve your attention and support. If you missed my conversation with Pat Bagely of the Salt Lake Tribune, the absolute dean of this art (working full time since 1979!), here’s a great excerpt, in which he describes how - unfortunately - when Trump was in the White House there was always a flood of options for his barbs (with more to come of course):

And here’s the full Sustain What conversation, which included a different kind of artist - Karen Romano Young, a masterful science illustrator and artist author: