The Wall Street Journal vs. 'Doonesbury:' UPS considers a Journal editorial enough of an apology/retraction to withdraw the threat of legal action over inker controversy.
The Wall Street Journal vs. |Doonesbury'Universal Press Syndicate withdrew a threat of legal action against the Wall Street Journal after the newspaper ran a "Doonesbury" editorial.
The lengthy December 18 editorial was actually quite critical of "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau, but Universal felt the piece contained enough of an apology/retraction to call off its attorneys.
Universal's attorneys had set December 18 as the deadline for an apology/retraction for the Journal's November 21 editorial-page "aside" comparing Trudeau to Milli Vanilli, the disgraced music duo exposed as lip-syncers of other singers' voices.
This aside was based on a report in the November 8 Entertainment Weekly (EW) magazine implying that Don Carlton is a ghost artist for Trudeau.
Universal vice president/editorial director Lee Salem said Trudeau creates all the "Doonesbury" art and writing, pencils it in, and then sends the strips to Carlton for final inking. This, explained Salem, saves time for the tightly deadlined Trudeau.
The Universal executive stated that a number of other comic creators have a similar arrangement with inkers, and added that Carlton's role has never been kept secret. Carlton was mentioned in a Newsweek cover story last year (see E&P, October 20, 1990) and in various other articles since starting to ink "Doonesbury" in 1971, according to Salem.
Carlton is a former Universal employee who now works for Trudeau, although he still lives near the Kansas City-based syndicate. Trudeau is a resident of New York City.
EW ended up running an apology/ in its November 29 issue stating that it overemphasized Carlton's "Doonesbury" role.
That EW issue was already out when Universal sent a letter to the Journal asking for a similar correction. Salem said the syndicate subsequently sent another letter, made a number of unreturned phone calls, and finally talked to an editorial page staffer, but no apology/retraction ran as mid-December neared.
Finally, Universal had its attorneys send a December 12 letter asking for a correction by December 18.
The paragraph in the December 18 editorial which acknowledged possible wrongdoing read, "In calls and letters to the Journal, Mr. Trudeau's syndication service has now demanded retractions and apologies, though our report accurately disclosed that Mr. Carlton is the one whose finished product appears in the strip. Then along came the lawyers for the syndicate, threatening that Mr. Trudeau is not a |public figure' for purposes of libel law. We'd be happy to litigate whether Mr. Trudeau is more or less a public figure than targets of his cartoons, but we're also happy to say that if our |Garry Vanilli' headline and reference to Cartoon Syncing suggested that we consider Mr. Trudeau a complete fraud, we somewhat overstated the case. We were using what an experienced satirist might recognize as hyperbole, caricature, lampooning, or burlesque."
Salem - in explaining why these lines, amidst a long editorial critical of Trudeau, were acceptable to Universal - said "I think most readers can read through the political ideology and understand that Garry is without question the artist for |Doonesbury.'"
Speaking of ideology, Salem added that he wondered if the conservative Journal editorial page would have been so quick to take its "Garry Vanilli" swipe at Trudeau if the cartoonist hadn't been satirizing Republicans such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Dan Quayle in recent years.
"I didn't notice negative editorials about Garry in the Journal when he was going after Tip O'Neill and Jerry Brown," observed Salem.
When asked to respond to Salem's comment and several other E&P questions, Journal assistant editor of the editorial page L. Gordon Crovitz declined. "Once we've written on a subject, we basically leave that as our statement," said Crivitz, although he did say that the Journal returned Universal's calls.
One apparent reason for the correction delay was that Universal had declined the Journal's request for past Trudeau pencil sketches to compare with the final cartoons inked by Carlton. The December 18 editorial said the Journal wanted some sketches to "resolve the now-compelling question of who contributes how much to |Doonesbury.'"
Why didn't Universal furnish this material? "We didn't think it was germane to the issue of the correction and apology," said Salem, adding that the syndicate was concerned that taking the time to gather and send examples of Trudeau's pencil work would delay a Journal retraction. He further stated that EW didn't require proof before printing its retraction.
The Journal editorial also stated, "The use of an inker for art and lettering is rare for political cartoonists, though fairly common for newspaper comic strips, many of which credit the collaborator. Mr. Carlton got no credit for the strip's 1975 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning."
Salem said inkers' names virtually never appear on comics, noting that they are considered behind-the-scenes people like the syndicate editors who edit comics.
While agreeing that political cartoonists rarely use inkers, Salem stressed that Trudeau is a comic strip cartoonist. As for the 1975 editorial cartooning prize, said Salem, "It's not our fault that they don't have a Pulitzer for comic strips."
The Journal editorial also tweaked Trudeau for dishing out satirical criticism in "Doonesbury" while not being able to take it. "(W)hat happens when someone else pokes fun at the great satirist?" asked the editorial. "His people don't laugh, and they get legal."
Salem said Trudeau and Universal have no problem with "Doonesbury" getting criticized for its satirical content, but added that implying Trudeau is some sort of artistic fraud is a different matter.
The Journal editorial did have some negative things to say about the content of Trudeau's recent Dan Quayle series, which suggested that the federal Drug Enforcement Administration suppressed a file containing allegations that the vice president purchased cocaine while a U.S. senator (see E&P, November 9. 16, and 23).
In the last paragraph of its editorial, the Journal wrote, "This past Sunday in a Washington Post article headlined |Investigative Cartooning,' Mr. Trudeau expressed his views. He said, |Political cartoons are a kind of reality cocktail - part fact, part fiction, part serious, and part frivolous.' Readers, we guess, are left to figure out which parts of the reality cocktail are fact and which are fiction."
Trudeau devoted much of his December 15 Post piece to discussing the case of federal prisoner Brett Kimberlin, who is suing the U.S. government on the grounds that he was placed in solitary confinement to keep quiet about Quayle. Kimberlin figured prominently in the second week of Trudeau's Quayle series, which was pulled by about 25 newspapers.
"(E)ditors do have both the right and responsibility to delete materials they deem inappropriate for their readership, no matter what the reason," Trudeau wrote in the Post. "That process is called editing, and those who call it censorship are either careless or ignorant of what real censorship is. Still, readers do tend to have this uncanny ability to sort things out, and it's a good thing for me that most editors seem to concede this."
In the case of the Quayle sequence, most of Trudeau's 1,400 "Doonesbury" clients carried the strips.
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| Title Annotation: | Syndicates/News Services |
|---|---|
| Author: | Astor, David |
| Publication: | Editor & Publisher |
| Date: | Dec 28, 1991 |
| Words: | 1177 |
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