New York Times Ditches Political Cartoons Over Antisemitism?

Bogged down by controversy over an antisemitic cartoon, the New York Times announced that it’s no longer publishing editorial cartoons.

Although James Bennett, the editorial page editor, said the move was being considered even before the paper published a shockingly antisemitic cartoon in April, the timing still raised eyebrows.

The cartoon in question about Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump featured antisemitic tropes of Jewish power and control and was published during the Passover holiday.

It had been drawn by Portuguese cartoonist Antonio Moreira Antunes, of the Lisbon weekly paper, Expresso, and reached the New York Times through a syndicate. The Times apologized, disciplined the editor who approved the cartoon’s publishing, and canceled its contract with the syndicate, CartoonArts International. (Expresso deleted the cartoon from its site without an explanation or apology.)

Antunes later dug in his heels and insisted that the cartoon wasn’t antisemitic.

The controversy led us to launch a petition calling on the news industry to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. Without accusing the Times of institutional antisemitism, we questioned the environment and mindset where an editor could authorize such an image. We expanded on the reasons for the petition in a separate post.

Sign HonestReporting’s petition urging the media to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Despite the New York Times’ damage control, the paper published days later yet another cartoon about Netanyahu, further angering the Jewish community.

This appeared in @nytimes international edition this weekend. Whatever your interpretation of this particular image, we can only conclude that the New York Times is deliberately giving the Jewish community the proverbial finger even while it apologizes for its other cartoon. pic.twitter.com/PrX0TC1ffk

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) April 29, 2019

Scrapping the Toons

After learning that the editors were scrapping all editorial cartoons, the Times’ in-house cartoonist Patrick Chappatte wrote a response to the on his blog. (If that name gives you a feeling of deja vu, it’s probably because of his poison pen takes on the Mideast conflict over the years. See for example cartoons one, two and three.) Chappatte’s response to the Times is simply about the value of editorial cartoons and what the controversy means to him:

Last week, my employers told me they’ll be ending in-house political cartoons as well by July. I’m putting down my pen, with a sigh: that’s a lot of years of work undone by a single cartoon – not even mine – that should never have run in the best newspaper of the world.

Although cartooning for the New York Times is a high-profile position, the Swiss-Lebanese national won’t be left high and dry — Chappatte also draws for other European papers. The Times also let go of a second cartoonist, Heng Kim Song.

But scrapping cartoons may not be as drastic a shift as it seems — at least by NYT standards. If we’re not mistaken, in the New York Times 168-year history, it never published editorial cartoons until Chappatte convinced editors to bring him on board in 2001. Moreover, the unfortunate trend in US papers is that in-house cartoonists are casualties of declining newsroom budgets.

So don’t jump to conclusions that the Times ditched cartoons because editors couldn’t find artists who are not antisemitic or because the paper caved in to furious pro-Israel readers.

That said, dropping cartoons is a shame, because through the use of humor and drawing skills, good political cartoonists can make you think about issues in a different way. Today’s memes aren’t that different from the work of earlier artists such as Thomas Nast, whose cartoons in Harpers Weekly brought down New York’s powerful Tammany Hall political machine.

The New York Times certainly needed to take action after publishing Antunes’ hateful cartoon. But with this step, the editors threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Featured image: CC BY-SA Adam Jones;

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