The Chicago Tribune (p. 5.9) today censored a “Prickly City” cartoon. The Tribune ran a “Bizarro” strip instead along with this explanation: “Today’s Prickly City does not meet the Chicago Tribune’s standards of fairness. Please enjoy this substitute.”
This is today’s strip, which the Tribune censored:
[Click on the strip itself to enlarge]
In trying to figure out why the strip is unfair, I can only guess that the Tribune thought that the Mary Jo Kopechne death in 1969 was too old to be fair to use, though their news stories considered George W. Bush’s activities from the late 1960s and early 1970s to be fair to use. Or perhaps they thought that bringing up Kennedy’s causing Kopechne’s death was unfair because it was unrelated to the Iraq War, but political criticism often is based on charges of inconsistency between two events related only by one or more facts–here that they both involve death and alleged lies, misleading statements, and indifference.
Disclosure: The Chicago Tribune (and many of its subsidiaries) are former clients of mine. [Also, this post was edited very shortly after posting.]
UPDATE: My daughter noticed this in the Tribune this morning and pointed it out to me. She uses part of her allowance and babysitting money to pay for a subscription. She is a Nader supporter.
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