Newspaper editorial cartoonists love to draw President Donald Trump! We make Trump fat. We give Trump a crazy-long red tie, a bright orange face and a grand swoop of yellow hair.
Trump appears in editorial cartoons more than any other president, or anything else, has ever appeared in cartoons before. Just as Trump dominates the news on TV every night, he dominates political cartoons.
Our problem is that newspaper editors don’t like to publishing drawings of Trump.
I’m a cartoonist who runs a newspaper “syndicate” that distributes the work of about 60 of the top cartoonists from around the world to newspaper editorial page editors. Close to half of America’s approximately 1,400 daily, paid-circulation newspapers subscribe to my “package” service at CagleCartoons.com, where editors can pick what they like from a collection of up to 20 different cartoons on a single day.
We have a broad range of political cartoons, reflecting a spectrum of content from liberal to conservative, across a range of issues, and editors are free to choose from any of it, with each cartoon presented in the same way. Subscribing editors choose to download high-resolution images of the latest cartoons to print in their papers, and I track the statistics of what the editors choose to download.
Since our our subscribing editors represent a very large and fairly random sampling of newspapers, I can safely project that the trends we see in editors’ choices are representative of all American newspapers, including those that subscribe to our competitors that offer a similar range of editorial cartoons in their syndicate packages.
I don’t think anyone has ever tracked statistics like this before, and what the stats reveal about editors is surprising.
The most surprising thing the statistics reveal is that editors simply don’t want political cartoons that depict Trump. Sometimes, when he makes lots of news, the majority of the editorial cartoonists draw Trump and editors still avoid those cartoons.
I post a collection of the Top 10 most reprinted cartoons of the week, every week on my blog at DarylCagle.com. Some 20 percent of our cartoons get 80 percent of the reprints, and the Top 10 cartoons are by far the most reprinted.
The last time a drawing of Trump made our Top 10 list was in March; it was a drawing I did of a tiny Trump who is oblivious to a giant wave of coronavirus that was about to hit him.
Most newspapers are small, rural or suburban newspapers in conservative areas; big-city papers tend to be the liberal ones. Most cartoonists are liberal, and the conventional wisdom among cartoonists has been that conservative cartoonists are more widely reprinted because there are few conservative cartoonists and most, small and red state papers want conservative cartoons.
Recent stats show that this is all wrong.
Even though we hear from conservative editors who complain that there aren’t enough conservative cartoons, editors from both liberal and conservative regions tend to select the same cartoons — funny cartoons about newsy topics that express little or no opinion.
In fact, the more strongly an opinion is expressed in a cartoon, either liberal or conservative, the less likely editors are to choose to reprint the cartoon.
Editorial cartoonists have their own macho culture. We like to draw strong cartoons that hit readers over the head with our points of view. We draw out of passion. We’re certainly not in the business for the money, so the choices editors make are very frustrating for us.
Some strong metaphors can almost guarantee that a cartoon won’t be reprinted, no matter what the point the metaphor is used to make. Cartoonists, especially foreign cartoonists, like to draw blood in cartoons to represent terrible violence, they like images of the Ku Klux Klan to represent racism, and drawings of Adolf Hitler to depict a murdering, fascist tyrant; these cartoons rarely get reprinted.
American editors don’t like cartoons from foreign countries at all; conversely, foreign editors don’t like reprinting American cartoonists.
The idea that cartoons are a “universal language” is a canard; editorial cartoons stop at national borders. Unless there is a huge foreign story involving America overseas, American editors don’t choose to reprint cartoons about foreign events even by American cartoonists.
New events find their way onto the Top 10. We’ve had some cartoons on the Black Lives Matter protests and racist monuments showed up on our Top 10 recently, but not as many as I’d like to see. There were many more images of Trump in cartoons that got ink in the early days of his administration.
What do editors like? Lately they like cartoons about the COVID-19 pandemic, with cartoons about families coping with shortages, masks, back to school, social distancing and sports topping the list.
In normal times, editors prefer cartoons that comment on popular culture, celebrity schadenfreude, modern family dynamics, struggles with technology, the workplace and new trends.
The timid choices that newspaper editors make are disturbing enough to bring a tear to the eye of the Statue of Liberty.
— Editorial cartoonist Daryl Cagle lives in Montecito and runs the CagleCartoons.com news syndicate, distributing editorial cartoons to more than 850 news sites and newspapers around the world, including Noozhawk. Contact him at editor@cagle.com, follow his blog at www.darylcagle.com and follow him on Twitter: @dcagle. Click here for previous cartoons. The opinions drawn are his own.