By The Editorial Board
Throughout pre-college education, teachers lured students towards history with an accessible and fun way to learn about the past: political cartoons. From the American Revolution and the Civil War to the Cold War and the Great Depression, there wasn’t an issue a political cartoon couldn’t discuss.
That is until recently. Scoop up almost any newspaper and you’d be hard-pressed to find a same-day political cartoon, in a tragic move away from a staple of American history. Some publications have even done away with opinion pages in daily print altogether.
Political cartoons have always been a bridge to express hot-button issues to all generations. They were a way to express free speech and open discussions, something most news articles can’t do because they can’t be understood at just a skim or a glance.
In 2019, the New York Times cut all political cartoons after publishing one that was deemed “anti-Semitic.” By 2021, Pulitzer Prizes were no longer awarded for political cartoons, and in 2022 the Editorial Cartoons category was renamed Illustrated Reporting and Commentary.
Jump ahead to 2023 and the layoffs of three Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists in a single day — including the president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists — further drove newspaper opinion pages into the ground. Less than a month earlier, World Press Cartoon, an independent composite of editorial cartoons, announced it couldn’t organize a prize due to a lack of funding.
The McClatchy family of newspapers that fired their cartoonists said it was due to “changing reader habits” and serving information unique to the community. Tim Nickens, a retired editorial page editor at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida said there was little that the cartoonists could do to prevent the movement.
“There’s a broader reluctance in this political environment to make people mad,” Nickens said in an Associated Press article. “By definition, a provocative editorial cartoonist is going to make somebody mad every day.”
Most recently, famous editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who worked at the Washington Post for 17 years, resigned in January. The award-winning cartoonist with more than 50,000 Instagram followers left her post after the publication killed her cartoon for the first time.
“This is a game changer … and dangerous for a free press,” Telnaes wrote. “I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’”
Physical editorial cartoons in newspapers are as endangered as Black Rhinos, and they have been for years. But visual commentary on politics hasn’t ceased, but has found a renaissance through memes. The most recent example is an internet-breaking edit of Vice President JD Vance. The memes, even as they have their own intrinsic commentary on the vice president, are the kind of online outburst that five years ago could’ve served as inspiration for the next Pulitzer Prize-winning work on how the internet engages in politics.
While memes have the ability to function as political cartoons, they still miss the mark. Traditional political cartoons were the work of intelligent people who could mix art with commentary, while meme culture integrated the word “pwease” and a baby face filter resulting in a less subtle and meaningful critique. Think back to U.S. History when you saw the famous Gilded Age-era cartoon, The Bosses of the Senate. Behind the rows of tiny senators stand the real men in charge — the industrialists — with overflowing money bags for bodies and a door labeled “People’s Entrance” bolted tightly shut.
How did we get from there to here, where the best that memes can muster is making Vance’s cheeks rosy like Santa Claus and giving him a little lollipop? It never took a genius to decipher the cartoons of yesterday. But even a dog can grasp the message of the modern political meme, and along the way we’ve lost the valuable critiques once offered.
Two things are at play. For one, publications fear being labeled “fake news” and are wary of associating themselves with a party editorially (meaning on an institutional level) unlike the 19th century newspapers that specifically and openly catered to certain viewpoints, like the abolitionist Liberator or the anti-Federalist Washington National Intelligencer. This is because reader expectations have changed, in many ways for the better. Ideally, the standard of objectivity has made publications strive to present different sides of an issue much more evenly and without observable bias, and perhaps some publications feel that cartoons chip away at that.
But at the same time, lines between opinion sections and news coverage have been blurred due to decreasing media literacy and the encroachment of commentary, talking head pundits and news-entertainment on national broadcast channels. Many outlets are not living up to the standards they set out for themselves, but they can at least appear to by killing the creative expression offered by political cartoons.
Let’s get back to the basics. The goal of political cartoons was never to separate people or spread misinformation, but to unite people and provide a laugh. We need that now more than ever.
