The Star Tribune's Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Steve Sack, recently announced his retirement. He had been on medical leave for several months already. During his leave and since, they have been running syndicated cartoonists from a range of political perspectives, as they tended to do on the days when they were not running Sack cartoons in the past.
I dread the future of political cartooning at the Strib. It will either continue to be a random spew of occasional thoughtfulness mixed with a lot of right-wing dreck and inanity, or they will hire some conservative to make up for the fact that they had a mainstream cartoonist (now perceived as liberal, god forbid) for decades.
Because, as today's right-winger the tells us, maintaining the illusion of false balance is important:
We have a Republican member of the Senate advocating making contraception illegal for unmarried people, and another one saying that democracy is not important. But go ahead, sure, let's pretend things are equally extreme.
Oh, and of all the cartoonists the Strib has run since Steve Sack was on leave or retired over these months, the editors have not run a single cartoon by a woman artist. Not one. Not even the terrible Lisa Benson, I'm pretty sure.
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Here's my six months of counting the Strib op-ed page for gender representation, including the political cartoons, carried out in the first half of 2021.
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