Editing...cartoons?

Did you laugh when you read Darby Conley's "Get Fuzzy" cartoon? I did. It's one of my favorite cartoons. It's funny, right?



Not everyone thought so. In its normal slot in the Chicago Tribune's funnies section last Friday, Sept, 14, in place of the cartoon shown above, was a nice little note stating that it wasn't running because it "did not meet the Tribune's standards for taste." This apparently stems from the cartoon's mocking representation of mobsters. The Chicago mob? I still don't understand.

I'm not the only one. An article opinion article by the Tribune's public editor, Timothy J. McNulty, addresses this specific censorship.

Jeff Nowak of South Holland, Ill., wrote to the paper and said "that the
only offense is a vague testicular injury joke" and so perhaps the newspaper
should remove its TV listings for "America's Funniest Home Videos" because that
appears to be the theme for such shows.

I didn't find the comic so offensive. I suspect I wouldn't even have
thought twice about it, like most readers, until it was taken out.

On the very same day, Nowak noticed, the "Doonesbury" comic played off the
arrest of U.S. Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho in a Minneapolis airport men's room and
compared it with the treatment of U.S. Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, whose
phone number appeared in the records of a Washington madam. "There's an
important lesson here, son," says the character Duke. "Stick to call girls." The
son replies, "And always pay cash."Isn't talk about prostitution offensive to
some readers?

So why did the editors of the section featuring the comics decide to nix this specific cartoon, on account of it's crude taste? Can you really edit cartoons like you would a story? Apparently you need to...

Editors make daily decisions about everything that goes in the paper,
stories, photos and, yes, comic strips. They never try to be gratuitously
offensive. But, as reader Nowak acknowledged about comics, "The problem here is
that you can't really determine which ones will be offensive to whom."

His solution would be to not "censor" any comics. Sorry, but that would be
abdicating responsibility. Personally, I don't always agree, nor does any other
editor I know, with all the decisions that are made, but ultimately someone
needs to decide.

Someone does need to decide. I was just unaware that this kind of editing happens within the comics section.

Guess you learn something new everyday.

Original story found at Romenesko.