A tale of two versions
About Ann Telnaes resignation from the Washington Post, and the state of media critique today.
It makes me anxious to write this but Substack feels like a safe place to say what you think even if you’re flip flopping about it. So please take this in that spirit.
Things are going on that are for many of us very difficult to reconcile. In the US but also globally today we have, on the one hand, half the population (+1) placing their confidence in people who have more power than anyone in those positions have ever held. Nobody feels sure about their motives or what they are going to do, but at the same time we are all, regardless of our politics, deeply bought into1 the systems that we rely on. There’s no going back.
On the other hand, we have half the population (-1) sheepishly falling into line with dogmatic ideology that has become detached from its roots and is intolerant of criticism. This is an equally unhappy place. Nobody likes scolds, finger pointers, and self-righteousness preachers telling you what to think, yet we are all, regardless of our politics, being dragged out to sea by this undertow. Somebody has to turn back.
The former 50+1 is considered to be conservative, the latter 50-1 liberal, though nobody’s sure if those categories even apply anymore.
suggests up/down might be a better way of thinking about it, elites vs. non-elites. And writes about the impossibility of knowing exactly where the tech elites stand progressive-wise.I find myself caught in the middle. Am I for or agin this or that? Am I a liberal or a conservative? By nature, I abhor compliance of any sort: no matter your cause, do not tell me what to do. But I am a compassionate sort too, a ‘helper’ if you will, as long as I don’t feel taken advantage of, which I do a lot these days.
And then there is the difficulty of being a creator. Am I an advocate or an observer? If criticizing, am I also endorsing something else? Or can criticism both float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Do I call it as I see it (gut feelings), or do I swim with the tide? And if the latter, which tide? What about objectivity?
The specific thing: Ann Telnaes quits the Washington Post
This past week, long time Washington Post editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned because a cartoon she submitted was not accepted for publication. She not only quit, but she then she went public, and then it blew up.
Here’s the cartoon. It’s a sketch, but a very fine drawing. Cartoonists submit sketches before doing a finished inked drawing. I’m happy to show it here because it’s a fantastic drawing, the Mickey Mouse in colour in a pose of exhausted adoration is genius! Trump with his long tie, tiny hands and feet is a masterpiece of economy.
Telnaes quit because she felt she was being censored. Her sketch shows a bunch of billionaires dragging sacks of money to the feet of a ginormous statue of the incoming President.2 The billionaires depicted included the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos. Here’s the cartoon with a story about the whole debacle.
Telnaes, and all editorial cartoonists, are talented, independent thinkers. They see the news with sophistication, meaning analytically. But cartoonists also work with editors. They don’t always get it right on the first try. They are used to rejection. They are used to drawing over and over and over again, partly to get the drawing right, but mostly to get the analysis right.
As a colleague of Telnaes told me, Telnaes is a seasoned pro, as calloused as anyone who is doing criticism has to be. She knows rejection. A failing in the drawing could have been corrected. A failing in the concept could also have been corrected through discussion and revision. But none of that happened. Instead, Telnaes got a crisp and final “no”, with a lame excuse that elsewhere in the paper the same point had been made before.
Clearly Telnaes felt the cartoon was not redundant and that her editor was acting for other reasons, namely out of fear of offending Jeff Bezos, their boss. In a way, her hands were tied, behind her back. Hence this, my first version, a cartoon in solidarity.
The complication
There’s always a backstory and for this drawing the backstory is that the Washington Post just 11 days before the election announced that it would not endorse a candidate. The history of the Washington Post would have dictated otherwise: the Post always supports liberals, so a Harris endorsement was expected. To not endorse Harris was therefor a pretty big deal.
But the Washington Post has not always endorsed liberals. It has endorsed Democratic candidates in every election since 1976 (Jimmy Carter, God rest his soul), save one, in 1988. Before 1976, going all the way back to its founding in 1877, the Washington Post never endorsed candidates. The Post’s announcement was not just that it would not choose sides in this particular upcoming election but that it was no longer going to endorse candidates at all, ever, presumably.3
Yes No Yes
I find myself asking, What happened in 1976? Why did the Washington Post decide at that time to become an advocate for whomever was running on the Democratic ticket, that is, the “left wing” or “liberal” cause?
A simple, un-researched answer would be because that’s the way the culture was swinging. The counterculture of the 60s and early 70s did little to change economics, power and politics, but it profoundly changed culture and those who didn’t go with the flow stood out. Cultural change bled into education, social services, the non-profit sector and government. And the rest is history as they say, five decades of liberalism expanding not just in the US but globally.
So, for the Washington Post to declare it’s going back to pre-1976 is like rolling back on the cultural shift begun in the 70s. To many people, it feels like a betrayal of everything we grew up with and believed in.
What is really ironic about this though is that the rolling back is not to conservatism or the right. The Post did not endorse Mr. Trump. You might argue that would have been too much, they would have lost most of their readership, but I’m not so sure about that. On it’s face, it is a commitment to “objectivity”. We have to take them at their word for the moment.
Where it gets complicated
Ms. Telnaes’ decision to quit the Washington Post is not really about having a cartoon rejected. It’s about no longer fitting in after spending a whole career being a lefty-liberal critic within an industry bent that way since the 70s.
The Washington Post may be condemned for throwing up their hands in the face of an ideological shift that is taking place and claiming neutrality. But might they not also be praised for looking at themselves critically for the first time in five decades? If there’s any time to reconsider a partisan past, now would be it.
I sympathize with Ms. Telnaes’ plight as a creator, I’m her generation, or perhaps a bit older. But, unlike Ms. Telnaes (who was on the payroll) I find it impossible to buy the narrative the media are always selling, that we are facing the end of independent journalism. From another perspective, independent journalism ended in the 70s and has been fighting the good fight against capitalism ever since.
Still, when I did the first version of my cartoon, the cartoonist with her hands bound, it seemed like the right thing to do. We all need to be vigilant about efforts to constrain speech.
When I started to dig into the history of the Washington post and the context of the cartoon, I wasn’t so certain that Ms. Telnaes was not spicing up her discontent by painting what is a momentous change in the zeitgeist as evil censorship. Understandable, but also contrived.
Change is hard, for all of us.
Rejection is not censorship, or is it?
Was Ms. Telnaes speech actually constrained? It is clear that Ms. Talnaes does not like what is happening right now in politics and is afraid of what’s to come, probably not just in politics but in culture too. And with good reason. And a lot of people feel that way.
On the other hand, business giving money to politicians is not news. Replace the statue in her cartoon with the Democrat in a skirt and it’s the same story. Wealth paying to get people elected and then pandering to them for favours. Hello, this is how democracy works. Everybody knows it and lives with the contradiction. It is almost laughable that anyone would even find this idea shocking.
Then there is the fact that Ms. Talnaes was not actually censored. She was not fired, arrested or persecuted. She had a cartoon rejected with a flimsy excuse. Her reaction could be regarded as impetuous, arrogant, dictatorial even, as in “Who are you to reject ME!” But I don’t think that’s right either.
There is this thing in employment law called constructive dismissal. It’s when an employer wants to get rid of someone but they don’t want to pay them out. So what they do is take away responsibility, move them around, make it clear they are not wanted, make the job as intolerable as possible so that they will quit. This is pretty much what happened to Ann Telnaes. She got the message and then she did exactly what the Washington Post wanted her to do, leave. No severance, no payout.
I think that’s too bad. I think that was the wrong decision for her to make. I think liberals like Ms. Telnaes need to figure some things out, like realizing that protesting the political scene the same way they always have doesn’t work anymore. It’s not that the criticism is not deserved, it is that the way people communicate and think about issues has changed completely. I have some ideas about strategies. I’m doing some research. Stay tuned.
Anyways, I think the decent left, the reasonable people with empathy who are self-reliant and believe in hard work and merit and fairness but with firmness have to find a new voice, one that speaks not just in the liberal echo chambers but to everyone.
That’s going to take more imagination than we see in even the brilliant Ann Telnaes’ cartoons.
Post Script
Don’t get me wrong, we have a lot to thank liberalism for. We have lived through a time of unprecedented prosperity since the 1970s. But the whole thing has been wobbling for a couple of decades at least. I had my first bad experience with political correctness in 1981. And what did I do? I tried to imitate it. (Sure, you can blame me for the mess we’re in, go ahead.)
It is not just the shitty politics of blaming and shaming that’s the problem now; it’s the unchecked pursuit of state corporatism. Just listen to the news. Really listen. Every story is about government (in Canada, on CBC for sure). And we, the people, have let it grow like that. We ask for government to help, to regulate, to build, to manage all our problems. And then, we feel helpless to change anything, to have any impact at all. Surprise.
Lately, I am finding a few people here on Substack are starting to talk about how liberalism might change. This is most welcome, but I personally don’t believe liberalism is capable of rolling back on a project that is premised on taking on everyone else’s burdens while not looking after your own. That is premised on largesse, and the unlimited growth of government regardless of budget. It is simply unsustainable: too liberal. And potentially oppressively controlling.
A la prochaine mes amis.
There is little to no discussion anywhere about how profoundly we are all committed to things as they are, the status quo. No matter what you say or who you vote for, if you have a bank account and any amount of savings or a pension, you are literally invested in the status quo.
He who shall not be named. I have coined the term President X. Not catching on so far.
Read all about the Washington Post on Wikipedia. It’s a fascinating story.