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By Mark Steyn
March 19, 2012 9:00 A.M.
NRO/The Corner
Excerpt:
Over at Powerline, John Hinderaker notes the Minneapolis Star Tribune comics page spiked a handful of Doonesbury strips last week.
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Last week’s strips concerned Texas abortion laws. Demonstrating the lightness of touch for which he’s renowned, Garry Trudeau shows a Lone Star doc picking up his “10-inch shaming wand” to perform a sonogram and declaring: “By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape.”
Hard to believe America’s dying monodailies don’t recognize Mr. Trudeau as the path back to solvency, but there it is. Explaining her decision not to run the strip, the Star Tribune’s editor Nancy Barnes made the following comparison:
A few years ago, we had a similar controversy over a decision not to publish some highly controversial cartoons circulated in a Danish newspaper that caricatured the prophet Mohammed… We chose not to run them in the Star Tribune because they would have been inflammatory and offensive to many readers.
As John Hinderaker points out, the two cases are not in the least bit similar: one’s a comic strip you run every day; one’s a news story about mass murder by frenzied mobs. You’re not being asked to carry a comic strip in which, say, Beetle Bailey accidentally burns a Koran; you’re simply being called upon to cover a news story in an honest fashion that provides readers with the basic information. If a newspaper can’t do that, who needs it?
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