After Moore and Singer were put back on the air armed with permission to spin the Chicks again, SAA associates realized that even in Colorado Springs, residents don't like their media options to be restricted -- which made an FCC-oriented protest a natural. On May 29 and 30, SAA forces gathered in front of the local Clear Channel offices, chosen, Stoddard says, because the Texas-based owner of 1,200 radio stations exemplifies the dangers of too much influence winding up in too few hands. "We stood out there with signs and gave a few hundred handouts to commuters driving past," Stoddard reports, "and overwhelmingly, we received a positive response -- quite different from when we were protesting the war. The same people who were pretty mad at us before were saying, 'We don't want to be force-fed news. We don't support corporate group-think.'"
In other words, fear of further media consolidation brought disparate people together in a common cause -- and the coalition hasn't fractured yet. Imagine what that could mean for the future.
Brett Amole
Criz Stoddard is solidly against media consolidation.
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Back to the drawing board: Political cartoons often stir passions, but a May 30 effort by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dick Locher set the feelings of many Chicago Tribune readers on purée. For that reason, other newspapers stayed away from the Locher salvo in the days that followed, with one notable exception: the Denver Post, which published it on June 4, days after the cartoon had caused a Windy City uproar.
The illustration in question features a bridge dubbed "Mideast Gulch" on which Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat faces Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon; the Sharon figure sports a Star of David on his jacket and an oversized, hooked nose that struck some as untrue to his actual proboscis and reflective of hateful stereotypes. Also on display is a caricature of President Bush, who can be seen placing dollar bills on the bridge in front of Sharon, who says, "On second thought the pathway to peace is looking a bit brighter."
To Locher, speaking to the online arm of Editor & Publisher, the cartoon was not racially denigrating: "I was trying to go to bat for the American taxpayer. Israel is a good friend, but let's get an accounting of where the money is going." Unfortunately for him, others took it differently. The Tribune was swamped with criticism from readers, and even the crosstown Chicago Sun-Times piled on. A June 1 editorial in the Sun-Times declared, "The cartoon's message -- that Israel's interest in peace is sparked not by a desire to end bloodshed, but by American cash -- is a lie that sails beyond legitimate comment into a baseless slur." That same day, Tribune public editor Don Wycliff wrote in his own paper that he tended to agree with a reader who called the cartoon "blatantly anti-Semitic, reinforcing the long-held racist image of Jews as avaricious and greedy." On June 8, a Tribune editorial expressed regret for publishing the cartoon.
At the Post, editorial-page editor Sue O'Brien, who picked the cartoon for publication, didn't hear about this controversy until after the fact. She says the opinion at the heart of Locher's cartoon differs from those espoused editorially by the Post; the paper usually regards American funds earmarked for Israel more as a stick -- something to be withheld at times of dispute -- than a carrot. The illustration was also at variance with a piece on the same topic by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen that O'Brien wanted to run, but she felt printing both offered readers balance and variety. As for Locher's point, she didn't find it anti-Semitic initially, and she had no objection to the sketch of Sharon, because it was a representation of an individual who's been drawn in many ways and not an entire class of people.
After receiving complaints exemplified by angry letters printed in the Post's June 6 and June 9 editions, O'Brien now knows better. In a forthright editor's note printed in both of the issues mentioned above, O'Brien wrote, "The cartoon was troubling on a number of counts, and I deeply regret having published it." Although O'Brien told Westword that she's always tried to keep readers' sensitivities in mind when picking a cartoon, she wants to do even better in this respect. As she put it, "I've tried to make my skin thinner."
