The various parts of a newspaper hold special interest for distinct types of readers. Readers who are into local news and current affairs gravitate toward the front of the paper, while those keen on business, sports or entertainment news go to those sections. The opinion pages appeal most to people with an interest in ideas and advocacy. But because those pages normally deal with issues affecting just about everyone, editors hope they are perused by a lot of readers.
It’s important that those pages reflect a variety of opinions. That’s especially true for Stars and Stripes, which doesn’t have traditional editorials like other newspapers. Instead, its mandate is to provide its readers in the military community with many points of view. Letters to the editor do that, as do the opinionated columns and political cartoons that Stripes runs every day over two pages.
When allegations surface that the opinions on the opinion pages are skewed, I, and the editors, take notice.
Last month Staff Sgt. Laurence Addicott wrote from Iraq (read letter) to “condemn Stars and Stripes’ practice of confusing the message of opinion pieces it clearly disagrees with.” He accused the paper of “planting a political cartoon adjacent to an opinion piece giving a nonexistent color to the content of the article.” He doesn’t specifically charge that the practice is left-leaning, but the examples he gives involve liberal cartoons allegedly confusing the messages of conservative columns.
The cartoons and columns are not “adjacent,” in the sense that one thing is next to another. And that’s a big part of the problem. In a traditional editorial page, the newspaper’s own editorial is on the same page as a cartoon, but separated from it. The two may or may not deal with the same topic. Stars and Stripes has no editorials; it has a variety of columns and cartoons instead, and when a cartoon is present it is embedded within a column. That gives the impression that the two go together. They do, in the sense that both deal with the same issue, but they do not arrive from the same source, thus can have a different take on the argument.
Juggling the columns with the cartoons to achieve some continuity of ideas is not easy. Brooks E. Bowers, who edits the op-ed pages, said: “The letter writer’s implication was that Stripes editors intentionally chose cartoons that attacked the Bush administration (and thus, in the bigger picture, leaned to the left) when other cartoons that addressed the specific issues but didn’t lean either direction were at their disposal. This was not the case. While Stripes can control which cartoonists’ work is available to Stripes editors, we cannot control the quantity or quality of that work.”
I looked at op-ed pages going back to early November and found the instances when a column and the cartoon within the column were basically mismatched in point of view were relatively rare. There were eight such instances, compared with 20 when there was a better match of points of view or the combination was politically insignificant. On a number of days, there was no twinning of a cartoon and a column.
Of the clearly political instances, the “matches” between the cartoonist’s philosophy and the columnist’s were fairly evenly split between liberal and conservative agendas.
Among the “mismatches,” there were more instances where the cartoonist was more liberal than the columnist, and some of these were the examples cited by letter writer Addicott. Here we come up to a second factor — the preponderance of syndicated liberal cartoon material compared with the conservative variety. Bowers assesses that among the stable of cartoonists most often used by Stripes, one is clearly to the right, one clearly to the left, two “balanced” and two essentially neutral but slightly left-leaning. However, he notes, there are times when most of the group will swerve in one direction — as they did (to the left) when things seemed to be going badly in Iraq. (Executive Editor Robb Grindstaff says, “We’ve made a concerted effort in the past three years to seek out more conservative voices for the op-ed page, including cartoonists, in order to help balance the overabundance of more liberal content that is available to newspapers.”)
Bowers says he regularly looks over the cartoonists the syndicates offer to achieve a better balance. “My goal,” he says, “is to have pages in which the column and the editorial cartoon are not a perfect fit be few and far between, and even then always adhering to the concept of the opinion page as a forum for ideas, not a vehicle for promoting political agendas.”
Agendas aside, it’s a fact that whatever administration is in power provides the fattest target of cartoonists.
The problem remains, mentioned earlier, of layouts that place cartoons inside columns, giving the impression they should express the same ideas. Restructuring the page to separate the two would not be easy, because of the requirement of placing the “Prickly City” cartoon strip on each weekday page. I wouldn’t want to suggest how to do it — and didn’t when I was editorial director in earlier years — but I think it just may be worth a try.
