Today on the site, R.C. Harvey and Ann Telnaes report on the latter cartoonist's recent experiences with hate speech and social media.
Ann Telnaes, editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post and a person I am delighted and proud to call “friend,” discussed recently the implications for her profession of the social media reactions to the notorious “Ted Cruz monkey children” cartoon she drew last December. Her article, which appeared at the Columbia Journalism Review website on June 29, 2016, appears below. As background, I’m reprinting forthwith the report I filed in my online magazine, Rants & Raves, Opus 347, last winter; here it is:
Cruz Makes a Monkey of Himself
A week or so before Christmas, Republicon prez candidate Ted Cruz released a self-glorifying tv campaign ad in which the Texas senator and his wife sit on the family couch while attentive, loving father Ted reads Christmas stories to his two daughters, ages 5 and 7, from books with such parody titles asHow Obamacare Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Underemployed Reindeer and The Grinch Who Lost Her E-mails. At various intervals during the ad, viewers are invited to send in donations to obtain their very own copies of the books.
At the end of the bedtime reading, the older of the two daughters speaks up, gesturing and pointing and turning her head dramatically from left to right and back again and again, calling Hillary a grinch and attacking her about her e-mail server. The words she speaks are clearly not her own: she’s reciting lines written for her (perhaps by her doting father?). Hers is a Shirley Temple imitation, but, as one viewer reported, the girl looks more like she’s auditioning to be the next Money Boo Boo.
A few days later—on December 22—the Washington Post’s Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, posted the cartoon displayed hereabouts, depicting candidate Cruz as that old time entertainer, the sidewalk organ grinder, whose monkeys are trained to dance in tune with the music the organ grinder grinds out—a virtuoso image of precisely what Cruz does in the tv ad.
Elsewhere:
Intruder, the two-year-old Seattle comics newspaper, is coming to an end.
The great cartoonist Michael Crawford, of New Yorker fame, could use your help.
This is the best online ad I've ever seen for a festival. Kudos SPX and Jim Woodring.
