“NEW YORK – New York Post Chairman Rupert Murdoch apologized Tuesday for a cartoon that critics said likened a violent chimpanzee shot dead by police to President Barack Obama.
In a statement published in the newspaper, Murdoch said he wanted to “personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.” He said the Post will work to be more sensitive.
Murdoch said the cartoon was intended only to “mock a badly written piece of legislation.”
The cartoon, which was published Wednesday, depicted the body of the bullet-riddled chimp Travis and two police officers. The caption said: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
Comment:
I didn’t see this until now, and I have to say it seems rather racist, even if the intent were not. Calling George Bush “chimp” is different for the simple reason there’s never been a history of white men being seriously categorized as monkeys, with all the social fall-out attendant. The slur was personal in that case – it had no group overtones. Black men, on the other hand, have had to contend with racial attacks in exactly this vein for more than a century, at the very least. There’s another angle to be considered. There are some people who find it incredibly enraging to have a black man as a president (I’m enraged by Obama too, but only because he’s a shill for the financial industry). Someone just might be incited to violence by inflammatory language and images..
Even if the cartoonist was only thinking of the animal that was shot and even though Obama didn’t write the stimulus bill, any editor with a modicum of sensitivity and knowledge of history, would have spiked it.
Of course, liberals can be just as guilty: these cartoons of Condi Rice seem to go over the line.
And remember the New Yorker cover last year showing Obama in Muslim attire, with Michelle Obama as a Black Panther terrorist and the US flag burning? Editor David Remnick argued that the left-liberal magazine of choice of the literati was obviously satirizing the right’s view of Obama, but pictures are very different from words, especially pictures unqualified by anything else. To even my well-trained artistic and literary eye, the picture was a bit of a shocker, given the context (election year, first African American president).
Why not err on the side of safety? How about shocking us with truthful reports about the financial ties between our pols and pundits and Wall Street? How about shocking us with a close examination of the so-called conspiracy theories (about 9-11, about the FED), that the mainstream media never touch. Maybe that would take a level of bravery, analytical ability, and intellectual honesty that questionable sketches don’t require.