"We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in."<p>This is a significant problem, not just for newsrooms, but for companies and individuals.<p>Nuance is not permitted in 2019 - this is simply the latest flavor of puritanical outrage that grips humanity. From the Salem witch trials to the Red Scare to the Harry Potter book burnings of the early 2000s, we are now privy to the latest incarnation of something as old as homo sapiens themselves.<p>The issue now is that the puritanical outrage stretches past the pulpit and Letters to the Editor and directly into your notifications, your DMs, your timeline; broadcast across the world and sending newsrooms and corporations scrambling with half-arsed apologies.
I think this piece is a great example of smug, establishment romanticism which grossly overvalues form over function. A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh, think deeply, or--most importantly--change my worldview in years. It's the most self-satisfied, pretentious, and outdated medium I know of. The author's notion that the loss of political cartoons is a serious loss of visual political culture is a self-absorbed joke. Visual political memes have become a massive and persistent grassroots social phenomenon with far more influence and engagement than too-clever-by-half political cartoons... not to mention certain animated shows with extremely sharp political and social satire. I don't think the author really regrets loss of political discourse. I think he regrets no longer being considered part of the political chattering-class establishment, even as that establishment loses its influence in a world of democratized information flow and opinion-sharing.
This reminds me of the famous Muhammad drawings in 2005 in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (JP). Back then they were seen as a defence of free speech and our democratic rights, a way of mocking the draconian regimes of the Middle East. Had it happened again today, the Puritan twittersphere would have been all over it and JP would likely have had to follow same route as NYT. Very sad.
Political cartoons are, in my opinion, reductionist garbage that fail to take into consideration nuance and complexity and context. The caricature that inflate the size of ears and chins and lips and noses is not dignifying and doesn't add any value to whatever argument is being made, and can sometimes even be racist. There's no rebuttal to a political cartoon, there's no dialogue. They're cheap and easy to make and easy to consume and are just as easy to forget.<p>I don't care if they exist or not, either way I don't read them, but standing up for political cartoons as being a thing worth defending, I don't think it is. I think they hurt more than they help.<p>Go look at political cartoons from the sides of opinions you disagree with and see how they make you feel. Are they convincing you of anything or are they just making you mad?
> "We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in."<p>It's strange, and perhaps unfortunate, that having pinned the blame on "Twitter Mobs", the examples he chooses to give are where cartoonists have been silenced by autocratic regimes (Turkey, Venezuela, Russia). The solution in these cases is to push back and defend press freedom, not to cave in and blame faceless social media mobs.<p>And when it comes to 'social media' mobs, is anyone really going to come into bat for the NYT and claim that the below is not <i>really</i> anti-semitic or homophobic? If you need to lean on anti-Semitic or homophobic tropes let me suggest you're not as funny, incisive or subversive as you think you are. Comparing yourself to CH in such circumstances is to claim a martrydom you don't really deserve [1] [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemitic-cartoon-roundly-condemned/" rel="nofollow">https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump-putin-cartoon-criticized-homophobic-n891811" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump...</a>
The decision to no longer have political cartoons reminds me of something from earlier days. Someone at the multinational I worked at did a prod a deployment and it went pretty badly. There was downtime of about 15-20 minutes. So immediately an edict comes from up high - we shall never have deployment during hours of x to y. Just massive CYA.<p>The guy isn't wrong about twitter mobs mowing down everything in their path and that's stupid. But he is speaking about it now, when it affected him. He had a great podium - should have said something when it was directed at someone he didn't like.
Yes, this.<p>Politically correct mobs are changing the world for the worst. In today's world, Eddie Murphy wouldn't make it out the door. And we would be worse off for it.<p>The great irony is that the very comedians who are being retroactively condemned were cutting-edge for breaking barriers in their day. John Cleese is a glaring example.<p>I have high hopes the pendulum will some day swing back the other way, and we will all be able to laugh at today's overzealous critics.
The actual cartoon, in case anyone (like me) is missing context:<p><a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-deeply-sorry-for-anti-semitic-cartoon-of-netanyahu-and-trump/" rel="nofollow">https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-deeply-sorry-for-anti...</a>
Here's an article over the cartoon mentioned here that sparked outrage in April which led to this:<p><a href="https://nypost.com/2019/04/28/new-york-times-condemned-for-anti-semitic-netanyahu-trump-cartoon/" rel="nofollow">https://nypost.com/2019/04/28/new-york-times-condemned-for-a...</a>
Relevant tweet that links to this same article and has a self-referential political cartoon: <a href="https://twitter.com/PatChappatte/status/1138145415604449280" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/PatChappatte/status/1138145415604449280</a><p>The linked article is currently down for me, as is the Google cache; does anyone have a mirror? I presume the article explains the Netanyahu cartoon that the tweet references.<p>My hot take without (being able to be) reading the article: No more political humor because of an internet mob seems like quite the shame.
To be clear, the NYT never did a lot of cartoons nor was it known for them.<p>I really don’t think this is a big deal.<p>If The New Yorker or sone other publication did, then maybe.
The article raises a very important point but unless I'm missing something, the comments here are identical to the twitter mob being talked about.<p>Are not statements quickly ripped of in a heat of emotion and consisting solely of impressions, rumors, opinions, hyperbole and intentional bias exactly the problem?
> This is the era of images. In a world of short attention span, their power has never been so big.<p>Given the reach of social media with respect to images, cartoons, memes, etc, do we need newspapers to be the distributors of political cartoons? Does it simply add legitimacy to some cartoons to separate them from the huge amount of low quality social media content?
Non political comic about political comics that I think about sums up the value of political comics (language warning, I guess)<p><a href="http://smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-07-02" rel="nofollow">http://smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-07-02</a>
This seems less like a case the "oh, the PC Police want to do away with political humor!" and more just shifting tides in media - i.e. that the conventional newspaper political cartoon is a form trending towards obsolescence. Political comedy is very much alive, at least in terms of its popularity and range across the political spectrum, attracting from the far left (e.g. Chapo Trap House) to liberals (e.g. most late night hosts) to all your various forms of conservatives (e.g. Crowder). To me the "political cartoon" as we once knew it seems like a dated formula, one that might be argued has already been replaced by the format of internet memes which can serve similar political function.<p>(Also personally I have never really cared for political cartoons, they've always seemed unfunny and too reductionist. Although I suppose the Stan Kelly Cartoons from The Onion might be an exception.)
Social media isn't the problem, low-information mob behavior has always been a thing. Pretty much all of the lynchings that ever happened in the USA occurred way before Jack Dorsey was a twinkle in his father's eye.<p>The problem is the structural flaws built into our brains.<p>Consider vision. If I showed you a wall of visual noise with a human face somewhere in the middle, you'd likely pick out the face in an instant. That's because we have physical structures in our visual cortex that specifically filter the information coming down the optic nerve for human faces.<p>What's funny is that higher judgement seems to work the same way. For most of the history of homo sapiens, we've lived in relatively small groups, and only interacted with comparatively limited amounts of information (compared to the typical internet feed). Think about all the things represented by scrolling down instagram: products and their place in your life, hundreds of people you've met over many years, trends and fads and memes which are themselves complex multi-layered ideas requiring lots of insider knowledge to grasp.<p>All of this is way more information than what a typical person had to deal with until about 100 years ago at the earliest.<p>So what's a brain to do? Our minds filter the incoming information until it's distilled down to the simplest possible version, the one with little nuance and zero subtlety. That's the idea that catches, because we lack the machinery to process 10,000 minor details for every little thing we do all the time.<p>Apply this to political discourse and you'll see why major political candidates spend precious minutes arguing over whether "socialism is bad," or "capitalism is bad." I'm sure many here understand it's way more complicated than that, but if you tried to get a real discussion going about nit-picky policy stuff, it'd go nowhere.<p>I'm not about to decry "attention spans these days" or anything, because frankly I don't think people are any different than they were 500 years ago, not really. And that's the problem. The only thing that's changed is what amounts to "common knowledge" these days, which is usually also an oversimplification of scientific reality.<p>The problem is that the world is just too big and too complex for our ill-adapted chimp brains to fully grasp, at least at the population scale, and Twitter and the like amplify this effect.<p>I don't have any solutions. But I know that we should keep doing the one thing humans are good at: building better tools. We can't exactly make society <i>less</i> complex, but we can probably make tools to understand it without losing (as much) nuance.<p>That's the only option I can see for fixing this sort of thing in the near-future, because even if these social media problems created selection pressure on humans (which I doubt), it'd be a long long time before we were cranking out baby Homo Interneticus.
Was there an announcement by the New York Times to do this? I am not calling him into question; I just wonder with what silence and shame they have made this decision.<p>Should they next ban their op-eds for their sometimes offensive ideas expressed?
The drastic step of eliminating all political cartoons carries a very specific and misleading implication, if one assumes that the NYT is impartial. Which they are not:
<a href="https://nypost.com/2019/04/30/anti-semitic-scandal-at-the-new-york-times-isnt-surprising/" rel="nofollow">https://nypost.com/2019/04/30/anti-semitic-scandal-at-the-ne...</a><p>With that in mind, ceasing publication of all political cartoons evidences extremely poor editorial discretion at the NYT. What, they are incapable of excluding Palestinian propaganda? Apparently: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/middleeast/christmas-lebanon.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/middleeast/christma...</a>