There's a fascinating development affecting our home town newspaper this week, in the wake of the Standard's inexplicable decision to "pull" a week's worth of Doonesbury comic strips parodying a controversial "ultrasound law" which was enacted by the Texas legislature this year. In truth, it's a national phenomenon, inasmuch as many American newspapers have been acting on concert to censor these hilarious but hard-hitting Doonesbury satire pieces. Here's the lede from an online outfit publishing from the feministing.com website (be sure to click the embedded links):
All this week, “Doonesbury” is running a series of comic strips about the ultrasound laws that have popped up recently. The first strip features an abortion patient being sent to the “Shaming Room.”Read on:I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise in our current political climate that some newspapers have decided not to run the strips about abortion. Or that the list of papers that have opted out of running the strip is dominated by publications in states where ultrasound laws have come up.
Of course, you can read the strips online if your newspaper is afraid of humor about the news.
Jamil Smith took a look at some of the papers censoring the strips and found a pretty ridiculous excuse...
Here's what the local stir's all about folks. Although the Standard has joined in on this gutless Doonesbury boycott, it's nevertheless provided these strips on the S-E online edition, a web publication which we guess we can now fairly characterize at the "Standard-Examiner's Grown-up Edition":
Frankly we don't get it. As political cartooning goes, this material seems pretty tame to us.
Compounding the problem, the Standard complains that it's received (predictably we think) a large volume of uncomplimentary form letters (the Standard inaccurately labels these as "plagiarism" and doesn't reveal whether these are emails of old fashioned snail mail), a situation which the S-E editors elucidate in this morning following Letter to the Editor "sample" piece:
In truth, we believe S-E reader Mary Platek (and her thousands of other co-authors) make a danged salient point.
Sodden question: If the Standard chooses to get onboard the censorship bandwagon with relatively innocuous material like this, just what else will the Standard hide from the print edition public view?
Who exactly is the Standard trying to protect?
Middle aged, male State Legislators, perhaps?
Update 3/15/12 10:00 a.m.: The Trib's Pat Bagley offers his own clever cartoon strip this morning, which we'll label as parody-upon-parody:
Too funny, no?
Update 3/15/12 10:51 a.m.: The Wall Street Journal carries on this topic a short interview with Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau himself:
Update 3/16/12 10:25 a.m.: Check out this savvy and upbeat "take" from Newsday:
Maybe print media news censorship really ain't that bad, after all.
