A black cartoonist had a powerful comic about police protests pulled from the New York Times

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/01/a-black-cartoonist-had-a-power.html

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is this that cancel culture everyone’s so afraid of?

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/prime/cancel-the-cancel-culture-handwringing-gop-2020-strategy

“They want to be able to talk like racists, but they don’t want to be called racist.”

I guess they retracted the Tom Cotton direct call for military violence against black people eventually? But there was a real fight before that happened.

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i don’t think that’s accurate. they apologized to staff for the tone of the article and the lack of fact checking, and many individual people at the times wrote opinion pieces on the editorial, but i don’t think the times officialy retracted or ( since it was an oped ) repudiated it.

to me it seems they’re scared of people on the right being mad at them, and that guides their policies

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Translation : Don’t upset rich white people.

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Yes, just famously leftist.

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The severely skewed perspectives one is exposed to on the internet is just mind boggling sometimes.

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You know what is funny about the NYT - I hear the left deride it about as often as I hear the right. Nobody seems to like it.

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I think that has a large part to do with a conservative distaste for fact-based reporting. Meanwhile, left-leaning readers see the paper carrying conservative water in its language and framing of stories all the time.

Here’s an infamous example:

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So we have to hear from Tom Cotton advocating murder, but this is too much speech for the Times? We get to know about Heimbach’s grocery tastes and the latest dapper nazi, but acknowledging that not everyone is heartbroken to see a burning cop car is too far.

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Yes but it’s the New York Times: they please no one (not even themselves) and they’ll never miss an opportunity to frot the right if it makes them look trendy.

and here’s one other small one:

https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-still-haunts-new-york-times

manual one box:

Chalabi was reportedly the main source of bogus information that former Times reporter Judith Miller used in her thoroughly discredited work about Iraq’s supposedly brimming stockpile of weapons of mass destruction … as the paper did its part to lead the nation to war.

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No, in this case, it’s not letting white people feel bad, which is a perfectly fine reason for censorship… /s

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Oh yes, I’d forgotten about that… little incident.

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Cancel culture and censorship didn’t make any sense when you could switch off the media, change the channel. But when it is an indisputable fact that the US president lies continuously and this doesn’t matter to the presidents party or the people who support him electorally then we are in a landscape of propaganda v propaganda. Truth seems to have no place here… and yes there are undeniable truths.

Fifty Fifty

[ttto: Roving Gambler–traditional]

I am the rag of record, job’s to keep it fair
Whenever I discern two sides
My stand’s between them there
Stand’s between them there, stand’s between them there.

A liar got in office and he gaslit all around
I stood up straight beside him
And split the difference down
Split the difference down, split the difference down.

He poisoned air and water that the others had kept clean
And I declared right then and there
“The truth lies in between
Truth lies in between, truth lies in between.”

He lied by noon and morning and lied some more at night
The others stood for truth and I said
“Each side is half right
Each side is half right, each side is half right.”

He treated his position as a self-enriching game
And I pushed out my chest and said
“Both sides are to blame
Both sides are to blame, both sides are to blame.”

He stole and robbed at random, hired hacks as bad as he
And I retailed his lies and said
“Some would disagree
Some would disagree, some would disagree.”

And now he says drink bleach, folks, inject a Lysol spray
I wear my wisest face and write
“Dems in disarray
Dems in disarray, dems in disarray.”

We’re seeing widespread death now and ruin’s in the air
And I stand proud and say it loud
“I always kept it fair
Always kept it fair, always kept it fair.”


It’s a little out of date, having been written around 130,000 deaths ago.
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I agree with the NYT decision to bring this comic to my attention.

I’m not actually making fun of the NYT. It’s entirely possible that they decision not to print it included a discussion of the fact that people would still get to see it. Still, printing Tom Cotton and pulling this for content is just part of the general deference to right-wing-extremism that’s permeates American society.

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