Tales From the Newsroom
When reporters tried to get the editorial cartoonist fired
When I was named the opinion page editor for the daily Oceanside Blade-Citizen in 1992, I inherited a staff of ½. Mark was our staff graphics editor — responsible for making up charts, maps, any kind of illustration to accompany a news story. But on Sundays, we ran his editorial cartoon.
He was — and remains — a highly talented artist.
What made him invaluable as a part of our opinion section was that he was an openly evangelical Christian, and his faith informed his work. That made him — and his cartoons — unique in the field of journalism. So far as I could tell, we were the only general circulation daily newspaper in the country with a conservative Christian editorial cartoonist.
All of the syndicated cartoonists we subscribed to — the usual suspects from the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Dayton Daily News— drew from a secular, left-of-center perspective.
Being able to balance out that rather homogenous stream with something right of center gave us a competitive edge. Made for a more interesting section, too.
When we’d run letters to the editor from readers upset about one of the syndicated cartoonists — Herb Block, Ann Telnaes, Mike Peters, David Horsey — demanding we cancel those contracts, our liberal readers would respond with letters of their own with poetic paeans to the value of free speech and diverse opinions, arguing passionately that no journalist should have to fear censorship for expressing an unpopular opinion, and on and on.
Many of those exact same writers, however, when confronted with a cartoon by Mark, would write or call demanding that he be fired.
I would patiently (mostly) take the call, let them vent, and then point out that it was actually me they wanted fired since I decided if Mark’s cartoons ran or not. He drew what he felt and thought — I decided (with my boss Rusty, the managing editor) whether it ran or not.
And as I told Mark once, “If I don’t spike at least two of your cartoons a year, you’re not pushing the envelope far enough.”
After the Blade-Citizen purchased the neighboring Escondido Times-Advocate from the Tribune Company in 1995, and we began to merge the two staffs and papers into what would become the North County Times, I was named opinion page editor of the blended paper after the more senior opinion page editor at the T-A asked to be moved to news.
Mark was also kept on as graphic artist and editorial cartoonist, as the T-A hadn’t had a staff cartoonist.
By this time, we were already seeing the beginnings of the politically correct or woke movement take hold in the newsroom. We had one incident, before the merger, in which a news reporter had gone into a senior editor’s personal directory on the newsroom server and looked through his saved emails. The reporter had then shared some of them with other reporters, with all of them mocking the fact that this senior news editor was Christian.
When the managing editor found out, he was livid — and although no one was fired (I thought they should have been), I’m sure that there was some punishment handed out.
A year or two after the merger, Mark was still weighing in on the issues of the day from his perspective — and left-of-center readers were still calling or writing to demand that he be fired.
Apparently, some readers who were also regular sources to some of our news side reporters were privately grousing to our reporters that they really didn’t like Mark’s work and couldn’t something be done?
One afternoon, a group of news reporters walked up to the ME’s desk and very somberly handed him a piece of paper.
It was a petition, signed by most of the newsroom, demanding that Mark be removed from his duties as editorial cartoonist because his conservative views were not only an embarrassment to the paper, to the rest of the staff, and even the community at large, but resentment against his cartoons was making sources reluctant to confide to our news reporters.
Well.
Rusty read it over carefully, waved them away back to their own desks, then called me over since I was the opinion page editor and supervised Mark’s work in the regard. I read it over, and quietly shared my views on the whole escapade — which were probably not fit for print in our newspaper.
About an hour or so later, Rusty called a meeting of everyone who had signed this petition, as well as me. So far as I know, Mark was not aware of any of this.
As the reporters filed into a large conference room and took seats around the long table, Rusty just sat at the front of the room, saying nothing. After a few minutes of increasingly uncomfortable silence, Rusty put the petition on the desk in front of him, looked at it for a bit — then picked it up and crumpled it into ball before tossing it into a nearby trash can. He turned to the assembled reporters and, in a pretty quiet voice considering how angry I knew he was, said something along the lines of, “As a courtesy to you all, I’m going to pretend this never happened.” He paused again for a bit, then continued, “If anyone ever comes to me again demanding that another employee be fired because you don’t like how they do their job, I will personally fire you on the spot.” A last pause, and even more quietly, but with a definite note of disgust, “Get back to work.”
As a fellow conservative, I was no more popular among the staff than Mark, so I wasn’t privy to whatever discussions followed among the news reporters..
But that was the last staff petition I ever heard about at the NCT.
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