Former President Donald Trump walks off stage at the end of a campaign rally at Lee’s Family Forum on October 31, 2024 in Henderson, Nevada. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The most insightful George Orwell bumper-sticker wisdom on the road these days says the following: “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
At a time when tech billionaires, morning cable news hosts, editorial boards and other once unshakeable stalwarts of the dissenting spirit have entered into an Olympics of competitive groveling before President-elect Donald Trump, speaking of ‘revolutionary acts’ in such an earnest way sounds increasingly quaint.
While Trump openly bellows whatever imperial fever dreams about Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and the Gulf of Mexico visit him in the dark of night, once proud institutional bulwarks rush to prostrate themselves before him in advance of any demand that they do so. Alas, the mainstream media is not immune to this siren-call of cowardice.
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit her job at the Washington Post last week because her editors spiked a cartoon in which she lampooned the paper’s owner Jeff Bezos along with several other billionaire sycophants in Trump’s expanding universe of tech-lord oligarchs. It was confirmation that our country has entered a dark period. No one leaves a gig like the Washington Post unless they’re sure that staying would be an act of soul-crushing journalistic compromise.
Telnaes quitting WaPo reminded me of when former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial cartoonist Rob Rogers was shown the door in 2018 because the publisher and the editorial page editor objected to his cartoons as “unfunny” and too relentlessly anti-Trump.
Rogers, a two-time Pulitzer finalist and the winner of just about every industry honor for a career that began in the mid-80s, has forgotten more about humor and editorial cartooning than his former bosses ever knew.
When six cartoons in just over a week were spiked when in previous years under a different regime he barely had half that many killed in a year, Rob knew it was time to decamp to less Trumpy environs after six cartoons in just over a week were spiked — a sharp and unprecedented change from the norm. He’s now syndicated by GoComics and deals with far fewer editorial headaches.
I asked my old friend and PG colleague to comment on the similarity of his firing with Telnaes’ last week and what it might mean for these times.
“I definitely felt a little bit of deja vu when I read my friend Ann Telnaes’ post on Substack about her decision to resign from the Washington Post after having a Trump cartoon killed,” Rob said in an email.
“Her cartoon was also critical of Jeff Bezos, owner of the Post. Ann was not some rogue operator flaunting the will of the paper. Like me, she worked with editors when cartoons needed to be tweaked for clarity and content. According to Ann, this was the first time she had a cartoon killed because of WHO the target was.”
For its part, WaPo defended its actions as a case of jettisoning a cartoon that was too similar to sentiments expressed by a columnist who, if this excuse is to be believed, beat Ann Telnaes to the sentiment first. Apparently, to avoid redundancy, only one opinion writer or columnist at a time is allowed to express a particular notion. What nonsense!
“Sadly, this is another example of obedience in advance by Bezos and other billionaires trying to curry favor (or minimize animosity with Trump,” Rob wrote. “Editorial cartoonists have become an easy scapegoat for weak-kneed publishers and editors in recent decades. But, when it comes to holding the powerful in check, nothing breaks through with readers like a powerful editorial cartoon. Cartoons are always the most-read feature on an editorial page.”
The drift toward preemptive surrender by many of society’s most powerful individuals and institutions hasn’t gone unnoticed. Following Trump’s reelection victory, the cast of Saturday Night Live, among his most fiercest critics in popular culture, staged a fake appeasement cold open to mollify his vengeful spirit.
After listing only a fraction of the horrible things he’s done, including his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, the cast cheerfully rewrote its own history of dissent: “We have been with you all along,” a cast member shouted insincerely.
This points to a tactic that might work across the board for Trump’s critics — employ satire and critique that is indirect instead of insisting he’s a fascist. That approach, obviously, didn’t engage the plurality of Americans, including young men of color, who voted for him.
Still, there should always be a place in our news ecosystem for what Ann Telnaes and Rob Rogers do. “The great Washington Post cartoonist Herblock once said, ‘if the prime role of a free press is to serve as critic of the government, cartooning is often the cutting edge of the criticism,’” Rob wrote.
“Herb would be dismayed and outraged at the behavior of the management at the newspaper he loved so much.”
There’s nothing new about the owners of once swaggering media operations kowtowing to power because of financial conflicts of interest or opportunism. Still, the breadth of this cowardice and mendacity has never been so disruptive to the functioning of American democracy.
“Ann Telnaes will continue to create powerful, funny and insightful work,” Rob said in closing. “She will be fine. I can’t say the same for the state of the free press in this country.”