Cartoonists fire a direct connection to shrinking media

NEW YORK –

Even during a year of sobering economic news for media companies, the firings of three Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists in one day hit like a gut.

The firing of the cartoonists employed by the McClatchy newspaper chain last week was a stark reminder of how an influential art form is dying out, part of a general trend away from opinion content in the struggling print industry.

Jack Ohman of Sacramento Bee of California, who is also president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, lost their job; Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky and Kevin Siers of the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. Ohman and Siers were full-time staffers, while Pett worked on a freelance contract. The layoffs on Tuesday were first reported by The Daily Cartoonist blog.

“I had no warning at all,” Ohman told The Associated Press. “I was stunned.”

McClatchy, which owns 30 US newspapers, said it would no longer publish editorial cartoons. “We made this decision based on changing reader habits and our relentless focus on providing the communities we serve with local news and information they can’t get anywhere else,” the chain said in a statement.

There is a rich history of editorial cartoons, including Thomas Nast’s vivid depictions of corrupt New York politicians in the late 19th century and Herbert Block’s drawings of a sinister-looking Richard Nixon in The Washington Post.

According to a report by the Herbert Block Foundation, there were about 2,000 editorial cartoonists employed by newspapers at the turn of the 20th century. Now Ohman estimates there are fewer than 20.

The last full-time cartoonist to win a Pulitzer was Jim Morin of the Miami Herald in 2017. Since then, due to the dwindling number of cartoonists on staff, the Pulitzers have broadened the category they compete in and renamed it “Illustrated Reporting and Commentary.”

While written editorials can sometimes be ponderous and intimidating readers, the impact of a well-done cartoon is immediate, Pett said.

“Usually when you look at an editorial cartoon, it’s (made by) a guy like you who’s angry and can draw,” he said. “It’s just recognizable.”

While economics is clearly a factor in an industry that has lost jobs so dramatically that many newspapers are mere shadows of themselves, experts say shyness also explains the dwindling number of cartoonists. Readers are already disappearing, why give them a reason to be angry?

Pett has been involved in a run-in with Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s attorney general and a Republican candidate for governor. Cameron, who is black, has accused Pett of being a race baiter in his cartoons and called for his firing at a press conference — unaware that his wish had been granted hours earlier, said Pett, a 2000 Pulitzer winner.

His bosses never told him to avoid cartoons about Cameron, but gave him a set of guidelines, Pett said. For example, he was told not to portray Cameron backwards wearing a MAGA hat.

“There’s a broader reluctance in this political environment to drive people crazy,” said Tim Nickens, retired editor-in-chief of Florida’s Tampa Bay Times. “By definition, a provocative cartoonist will drive someone crazy any day.”

Pet agrees.

“I could have looked at the guy who fired me and said, ‘I’ll do it for free,’ and they would have said no,” he said.

McClatchy emphasizes that local opinion journalism remains central to its mission. The Miami Herald, a McClatchy newspaper, won a Pulitzer this year for “Broken Promises,” a series of editorials about the failure of rebuilding troubled areas in South Florida.

In the current atmosphere, however, opinion is less valued. Gannett, the nation’s largest chain with more than 200 newspapers, said last year its newspapers would only offer opinion pages a few days a week. The executives reasoned that these pages were not widely read, and surveys showed that readers did not want to be lectured.

That also meant less space for cartoons.

The rationale is that there are plenty of places to find opinions online, especially on national issues. Political statements of support are less common in newspapers. In 2020, only 54 of the country’s top 100 newspapers supported a presidential candidate, up from 92 in 2008, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“If publications really don’t stand for anything in an editorial sense, it’s detrimental whether the pieces are widely read or not,” says Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at The Poynter Institute.

While the idea may be to avoid polarizing national issues and focus on local issues, the irony is that newspapers that still want to use cartoons will be forced to turn more to syndicated services, whose pieces mainly deal with national or international issues.

That’s what Pett signs for his contract with the Tribune Media Co., not Kentucky cartoons.

“This isn’t particularly a crisis of cartoons,” said Mike Peterson, a blogger at The Daily Cartoonist. “This is a crisis of newspapers unable to connect with their communities.”

Like newspaper owners, some cartoonists themselves fear that there is now less taste for political satire and more for innocent, funny drawings of the type popular in the New Yorker magazine.

“Ultimately, I think people like cartoons,” said Ohman, who won his 2016 Pulitzer. “But it’s hard for a cartoon to be ecumenical.”