BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Friday, April 23, 2004
BITCH, BITCH, BITCH. If you
turn to page E13 of today's Boston Globe, you'll find this
where Doonesbury usually appears:
To our
readers
The Globe has decided not to
publish today's installment of "Doonesbury" because the strip
includes language inappropriate for a general readership. The
strip's creator declined to change the wording or offer a
substitute. "Doonesbury" resumes in tomorrow's comics pages.
Today's strip is available online at www.boston.com/ae/comics/.
Now, I already knew that B.D.'s leg
had been blown off in Iraq. When I saw the disclaimer this morning, I
figured cartoonist Garry Trudeau must have had him let loose an
F-bomb. So I was more than a little surprised when I learned the
offending phrase was "son of a bitch." Pretty mild stuff.
Romenesko's got a round-up
of newspaper reaction. To me, the proof that the Globe
overreacted was the decision by the Tallahassee Democrat to
run the strip unedited.
A couple of additional
observations:
- Adam Gaffin, the Roslindale guy
behind Boston
Online, did a
quick
search and found that the
Globe published 12 articles last year that used the word
"bitch." His suggestion: if "bitch" is too rough for the funny pages,
move Doonesbury to the op-ed page. (He also suggests moving
Mallard Fillmore and maybe Boondocks to op-ed, but, uh,
don't you need room for columns and stuff?)
- The Globe's wimp-out
suggests that the Internet has made it too easy for editors to err on
the side of hypercaution. Doonesbury has always been
controversial, and a number of newspapers have pulled it from time to
time over the years. (And, kids, you're not going to believe this:
Doonesbury used to be funny, too. It was during a time called
the '70s.) Ten years ago, an editor would have to think long and hard
before dumping that day's Doonesbury, since it would have been
very difficult for readers to see it elsewhere. Today, not only can
Globe readers find it on the Web, but the Globe gives
them the URL.
The good part is that even if
something like today's Doonesbury gets dumped, it's still
widely available to almost everyone. The bad part is that this
encourages fuzzy thinking: the consequences are much lower for an
editor who decides not to run a cartoon if he or she knows that
readers will be no more than mildly inconvenienced.
ANOTHER MAGIC WOODWARD
MOMENT. The reason that the Bush-Cheney website recommends
Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack is that George W. Bush is
running for re-election and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
isn't.
In September 2002, according to
Woodward, Bush met with congressional leaders and outlined the
reasons he was considering going to war. By Woodward's account, it
went well. Then it was Rumsfeld's turn. Woodward writes:
In the "Night Note for
September 4," Christine M. Ciccone, a young lawyer who covered the
Senate for [Nicholas] Calio [Bush's congressional
liaison], reported on Rumsfeld's one-and-a-half-hour briefing.
"You have already heard it was a disaster and [Trent] Lott
views it as having destroyed all of the goodwill and groundwork
that the president accomplished during his meeting this morning. I
found myself struggling to keep from laughing out loud at times,
especially when Sec. Rumsfeld became a caricature of himself with
the 'we know what we know, we know there are things we do not
know, and we know there are things we know we don't know we don't
know.'"
Senators had expected that the
briefing, coming on the heels of the president's meeting that
morning, would begin the process of making the administration's
case, she reported. "Instead, Secretary Rumsfeld was not prepared
to discuss Iraq issues, was unwilling to share even the most basic
intelligence information, and wasn't having a good day.... There
is a lot of cleanup work to do here."
Obviously the senators didn't
realize that Rummy was reciting poetry.
posted at 12:39 PM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
