This
past weekend, Ted Cruz put out a political ad that was actually good
and funny. The ad first aired in Iowa during a broadcast of “Saturday
Night Live,” a fun take on their ad parodies. You can watch it here:
It features Cruz reading to his family such festive and timeless
classics as “How Obamacare Stole Christmas” and “Rudolph the
Underemployed Reindeer.” It’s well written and well produced, so of
course some people got upset. But no one got quite as upset as Ann
Telnaes, an editorial cartoonist whose work is frequently featured at The Washington Post.
So mad, in fact, that she inexplicably portrayed Cruz as an organ
grinder whose children were monkeys on leashes. To make a long story
short, The Washington Post ended up pulling the cartoon, which was actually an animated GIF for the full “Ted Cruz’s children are monkeys!” effect.
There are so many things wrong with Telnaes’ cartoon and the
subsequent defense of it that it’s hard to know where to begin, but
let’s just dig in.
1) All Politicians Put Their Families In Their Ads
Telnaes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, so I’m
surprised she didn’t know this, but something approaching 100 percent of
all politicians feature family members in political ads. So unless
Telnaes was born on Saturday, there is no excuse for being ignorant of
this.
Maybe she should read her own newspaper for an explanation of this thing she thinks Cruz invented:
2) Children Are Off Limits
You don’t have to abide by these rules, of course, but one key rule
governing civilized behavior by the media is that kids are off limits.
Many hours before anyone had noticed Telnaes’ cartoons (her cartoons are
boring and usually not worth paying attention to), she tweeted out a
pre-emptive defense and pre-emptive justification for why she broke this
rule.
Again, I believe this was many, many hours before the cartoon was
noticed by anyone — perhaps before it was even published — so the
defensiveness on display was probably some vestigial conscience showing
up. She was also quoted by CNN as saying she thought that the kids were,
and I quote, “fair game” because of the ad that showed them being cute
and funny. Since all politicians put their kids (and grandkids!) in ads,
and this was just a particularly effective featuring of the same, this
makes you wonder just how ideologically blinded Telnaes might be.
Gabriel Malor had an
interesting series of tweets on this matter that I will condense here:
The core problem here is that Ann Telnaes has no moral foundation. She
knows there are rules, but she doesn’t know *why* there are rules. So
Telnaes simply thought she could reason her way to an exception to the
rule: kids are off limits. But her reasoning — Cruz did it, so they’re
fair game — does not actually address the reason for the rule. The
reason, in case you were wondering, why kids are off limits is because
they lack culpability AND the capacity to respond. That Cruz cast his
children in a good light does not mean that Telnaes is relieved of the
rule protecting them from being cast negatively. Telnaes doesn’t
understand this bc, again, she doesn’t know *why* we have the rule, only
that there is one. She lacks a moral foundation.
Just because the Cruz kids are adorable and funny doesn’t mean you
can go after them any more than you can go after Sasha and Malia for
being adorable when pulled out on stage at political events either.
3) Monkeys? Really?
As if going after children weren’t enough, Telnaes thought it would
be a grand idea to portray the daughters of the first Hispanic senator
from Texas as monkeys. I’m not sure if the dehumanization was done
because of that, because of their father’s politics or some other
reason, but it compounds the error in ways that make you wonder how in
the heck the cartoon received editorial approval from The Washington Post.
Just in general, journalists should avoid portraying and mocking the
kids of politicians, including the kids of Hispanic politicians, as
dancing monkeys. Does this really need to be said to Pulitzer
Prize-winning elites? I guess so.
4) It’s Not Funny
This is actually quite important.
The Washington Post
has always been a bad page for editorial cartooning. For something like
60 years they featured the ghastly work of HERBLOCK, whose distinctions
were drawing like a particularly uncreative five-year-old and labeling
literally everything in said drawings. Partly he needed to label because
he lacked any imagination at all and kept pushing out the same clichéd
metaphor for…everything. Partly, some suspected, it was because he was
huffing airplane glue.
If you’d like some delicious take-downs of HERBLOCK (his name was
Herbert Block, so this all-block-letter-combo-name thing gives you an
indication of his dazzling intellect), I’d recommend “
Cartoons Without Humor: The underwhelming oeuvre of Herblock, America’s worst political cartoonist” and “
Washington’s Blockheads: The perpetual adulation of Herblock.” From the latter, by the great Andy Ferguson:
Vampire bats sweep across a skyline, their bellies covered in writing:
“takeover tactics,” “raiders,” “greenmail specialists,” “junk bond
finances,” and “stock manipulations.” (This must be Wall Street!) And
there’s always a caption, too, another 15 or 20 words. “If you don’t get
my meaning,” Block seems to be saying to his reader, “I’m going to make
you sit here until you do.” It was his politics, mostly, that lifted
Herblock above his lack of technical skill to the Pulitzers and the
medals and the honorary degrees. His ideas were as simple as his
draftsmanship, and perfectly matched to the prejudices of the powerful
journalists he hoped to please.
All of which to say, Telnaes reminds me a lot of HERBLOCK. She can
draw better than he could (all humans can), but her ideas are just as
predictably progressive, clichéd, hyper-partisan, and so on. She
obsesses over the same, few causes (supporting abortion is her
favorite and disdaining Christians is right up there, too). In fact, her
attacks on pro-lifers
are so hackneyed that nobody will be surprised that she’s been given
awards by the country’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.
(Interestingly, this pro-abortion cartoon, which passes for perceptive
at
The Washington Post,
also features children on strings, which says nothing about pro-lifers but a great deal about Telnaes.)
5) It’s Overexplained
Another way that Telnaes is as bad as HERBLOCK is the way she has to
explain her cartoons. The cartoon makes no sense on its own because
normal people know that all politicians have their kids help them pardon
turkeys, appear in campaign ads, and whatnot. So she kept trying to
explain it in all of these tweets and remarks she made. If your cartoon
doesn’t work on its own, scrap the idea. Also if it’s racist, scrap it.
6) Did Any Other Politicians Feature Children In Their Campaigns Yesterday?
Wait, what’s this?
Oh, Hillary Clinton put out a picture of herself with her older
grandchild (the second one is due this summer) as part of a campaign
called “7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela”? I
can’t wait for Telnaes to take her to task for exploiting these
grandchildren!
7) It’s The Ghastly Double Standards
Last year, a low-level Capitol Hill staffer made some critiques on
Facebook of how Obama’s daughters were handling themselves during a
political event.
The Washington Post more or less lost its mind. I wrote about it a few days after the story broke in the piece, “
Dear Media, This Nonsense Is Why Everybody Hates You.”
They had already run something like 14 stories on the matter, including
having a reporter dig up dirt from the staffer’s adolescence. It was
disgusting. As I wrote then:
I’d like someone to go ahead and circle back with [Post Executive Editor
Martin] Baron and have him explain himself. In what world — in what
mother-freaking world — does he justify taking a foreign affairs
reporter and having him dig up dirt on a low-level former staffer who
said nothing worse about presidential children than the Post’s own
columnists did in the Bush era? One of the items linked above is a Ruth
Marcus column where she bashes this low-level staffer for critiquing the
daughters, then notes she herself did it to the Bush girls –including attacking them for showing so much “cleavage,” being churlish, and their speaking style — but that it was OK because she did it under the guise of parody and they had notable busts. I’m not joking. You can read it for yourself. As John Podhoretz said, “Ruth Marcus’s double standard FOR HERSELF is absolutely astonishing.”
It’s so tiring, so unbelievably tiring. Everyone knows that there is
one standard for how you may treat the children of Democratic candidates
and an entirely separate and unrelated one for how you treat the
children of Republican candidates. The disparity of standards is even
more dramatic for progressive versus conservative candidates and their
families.
8) Media Coverage
Another tiring thing is the frame offered by the media for covering
this. When a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist with media
elite friends pens a cartoon portraying the children of a Hispanic
senator as dancing monkeys, what should the headline and lede be? CNN
went with “Washington Post pulls cartoon depicting Ted Cruz’s
daughters.” I guess they thought adding the words “as monkeys” would
have made it too descriptive. But
note the lede:
Yes, the newsworthy thing is that Cruz obtained new ammo to shoot at the media. Wait,
what?
I…I… I…honestly don’t know what to say to this. Also, in what sense are
they portrayed as “monkey-like” creatures and not “monkeys”? I have no
idea what is meant by this, although the reporter goes on to describe
them as being portrayed as “two hatted creatures,” which is, again,
quite weird. Many media outlets were reticent to mention the monkey
problem. For example:
Why would Cruz be upset at a cartoonist for drawing his daughters? Oh, she caricatured them crudely as “
chained dancing apes“?
Why, that changes everything and should probably be what you lead with,
eh? (In Politico’s defense, they later updated the story to not only
mention the monkeys, unlike the first version online, but to emphasize
it.) In any case, this focus on Cruz being inexplicably upset (or is it
“gaining ammo”?) instead of on the fact that a Pulitzer Prize-winning
cartoonist portrayed his children as chained monkeys is part of a
pattern of disparity. The initial story should be the fact of the
cartoon running, not Cruz’s reaction to it.
9) Ridiculous Defenses
Telnaes was deleting tweets last night as she managed to convince no one of her cause (I’m sure Vox or Salon or
The New Republic
are working on it as we speak), but she put a note on Facebook telling
people to stop complaining about the cartoon. And she put these tweets
on Twitter:
Um, no. The lower tweet looks like an attempt to portray herself as a
victim, something made ever-so-slightly difficult by going after a
pre-schooler and a seven-year-old in that day’s work. The upper is so
stupid — yet presented as if it’s somehow informative if not erudite —
as to be hilarious. But perhaps more disconcerting is the
editor’s note for why they pulled the cartoon:
Editor’s note from Fred Hiatt: It’s generally been the policy of our
editorial section to leave children out of it. I failed to look at this
cartoon before it was published. I understand why Ann thought an
exception to the policy was warranted in this case, but I do not agree.
What’s this “I understand why Ann thought an exception to the policy
was warranted” business? That’s, again, just stupid. Politicians feature
their children in ads all the time, as the easy-to-find examples of
Obama and Clinton demonstrate above. What is there to “understand” about
Ann’s perspective, exactly?
Further, is the only thing worth noting about this cartoon that it
went after children? I mean, the same editorial page wrote a story just a
few short months ago about how it was pretty sure Cruz was using a
racial dog-whistle in an ad,
although it couldn’t quite figure out exactly how. (I’m actually making
the editorial seem like it made more sense than it did.) It said the ad
only seemed to be about terrorism but was probably also a racist attack
on Latino immigrants, Syrian refugees, or Iranian Muslims. They didn’t
know which, but they were pretty sure that it was one of them enough to
call the ad “revolting.”
But portray some Latino kids as dancing, chained monkeys and the only
thing you can say is “leave children out of it”? Really? Such funny
dog-whistle-hearing capabilities at the
Post there, eh? Almost seems to fit a pattern, no? I’ll only add that a search for “
dog whistle” on the
Post’s search mechanism returns more than 500 results since 2005 alone.
10) Problems At The Washington Post
In Hiatt’s odd note that raises more questions than it answers, left
unnamed are the editors who did look at it prior to publication. I have
no reason to doubt Hiatt that he didn’t personally review the cartoon
before it ran. Sometimes editors can’t review everything. But some
editors reviewed it before it ran, even if they aren’t named Fred Hiatt.
Presumably many eyes were on that cartoon before it ran.
Was there no one to say, “Maybe we shouldn’t publish the racist
thing”? Is everyone reviewing what goes up so far left that they didn’t
see the problem with this unfair attack on the Cruz family? Is everyone
so stupid and uninformed to not know that 100 percent of all politicians
feature family members in ads?
