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December 2, 2005
Tribune's Folly is Cutting Cartoonists
By Chris Lamb for Editor and Publisher
The Tribune Company, the Chicago-based media corporation, continued to do its part to gut journalism as a vital part of American democracy by announcing massive layoffs at its newspapers, including the Los Angles Times. Among those losing their job at the Times was Michael Ramirez, the newspaper's Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Ramirez's departure was not lost on the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.
AAEC President Clay Bennett wrote Tribune Company CEO Dennis FitzSimons a letter on November 22, saying: "There are few journalists in a newsroom who can define the tone and identity of a publication like an editorial cartoonist does. By discarding those who make a newspaper unique, you rob it of its character. By robbing a newspaper of its character, you steal its spirit."
Bennett is right.
Ramirez's departure continues a trend that has seen the number of cartoonists working for daily newspapers fall to such low numbers they can qualify as endangered species. Like the bald eagle, editorial cartoonists are worth protecting.
Editorial cartoonists keep a jaundiced eye on our leaders and expose them for their hypocrisies, follies and crimes. They remind us that we are a country that prides itself on its tradition of free expression. Editorial cartoons are as irreverent as the Boston Tea Party and as American as the First Amendment.
What makes the Tribune Company's decision to fire Ramirez all the more absurd is that editorial cartoonists bring readers to newspapers. If FitzSimons and other media moguls are interested in preserving the newspaper industry - and I'm not sure they are -- they need to find ways to keep readers.
FitzSimons isn't alone in his eagerness to sell out newspapers and their indispensable function in American society; he is, however, the poster child for what's wrong with the newspaper industry.
In an October 10 article in The New Yorker, media critic Ken Auletta wrote: "Like most newspaper companies in the United States, the Tribune Company has to confront not only declining circulation and disappointing advertising sales but a belief on Wall Street that newspapers are a poor investment."
This is not to suggest that newspapers are not profitable. They are. It is common for a newspaper to make an annual profit of 25 percent or more.
But newspapers shouldn't be viewed the same as other companies. Newspapers have an intrinsic value that should not - nor cannot - be measured in dollars. A democracy depends on an informed citizenry, and an informed citizenry depends on an aggressive newspaper industry. The Tribune Company's cuts to their newspapers' editorial staffs aren't just bad for the newspaper industry, they're bad for America.
When the Tribune Company bought the Times Mirror Company five years ago, they got a number of highly reputable newspapers -- the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Newsday, and Hartford Courant. The Tribune Company has cut editorial staffs to drive up profits. The result has been that all the aforementioned are weaker newspapers than they were five years ago. As is the company's flagship newspaper, the Chicago Tribune.
In his letter to FitzSimons, Bennett criticized the Tribune Company's announcement that it would not replace Ramirez. Bennett said he hoped the Tribune Company's future layoffs would spare its other cartoonists - Ken Kallaugher of the Baltimore Sun, Walt Handlesman of Newsday and Bob Englehart of the Courant -- all among the better cartoonists in America.
Bennett has reason to be skeptical.
When Jeff MacNelly, who won the last of his three Pulitzer Prizes with the
Chicago Tribune, died in 2000, the newspaper vowed that it would replace him.
The promise continues to go unfulfilled. As does the promise of American journalism.
Chris Lamb, PhD, author of Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Editorial Cartoonists, is an associate professor of Media Studies at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC. He can be reached at lambc@cofc.edu.