From The Comics Journal 126, January 1989

Cathy Comic Strip Dropped for "Political Espousal"

The syndicated Cathy comic strip raised eyebrows, and flared some tempers, across America during Election Week with left-leaning messages to voters.

Some 40 papers lodged complaints, said United Press Syndicate Editorial Director Lee Salem, and "about two dozen" pulled or moved to editorial pages one or more of the two-week series' 12 strips (the series' two Sunday strips apparently ran unchallenged). Cathy appears in more than 500 newspapers, Salem said.

Papers pulling or moving the strip (or replacing it with earlier Cathy episodes) included the Evansville (Ind.) Courier, the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, the Milwaukee Sentinel, the Portland Oregonian, the Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union, the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer, and the Los Angeles Times. The Cullman (Ala.) Times replaced one of the strips with a paid advertisement for Republican presidential candidate (now President-elect) George Bush. Only the Cullman paper subsequently cancelled its subscription to Cathy.

"We anticipated some negative responses and that's why we talked with [creator Cathy Guisewite] about it when they came in," Salem said. "She made some cogent points and we went with those points.

Among the "points" espoused by Guisewite's Andrea character were detailed statistics on election spending and social programs, including child care and mothers in the work force.

"Senate Republicans killed a day care subsidy plan this month," blared Andrea's television in the October 26 strip, "preferring to back Bush's plan to give families a $1,000 tax credit for each child under age four. The Bush plan comes to $2.74 per day per child. While no one could find decent day care for $2.74 a day, his plan would allow each impoverished family to buy a decent VCR. " Not only would children have something to watch while Mommy rips her hair out," the TV continues, "but each VCR purchase would further boost the Japanese economy so they could keep boosting our economy by buying up all our buildings and businesses. Parents, of course, could tape all speeches explaining how well off they are."

"Get your bottle, honey," Andrea said to her baby, Zenith, "Mommy has to go to bed for four years."

Distinctions. "We draw a distinction between political subjects and overtly political diatribes," said John Brownell, View section editor for the Los Angeles Times, which dropped Cathy November 2, 3, and 4. before public outcry reinstated it. "[Garry Trudeau's) Doonesbury comments politically with a bit of wit and satire, and takes on politicians in general and some hard issues, but Cathy in this case essentially provided a political endorsement of the [Democratic presidential candidate Michael] Dukakis campaign.

"We're not trying to squelch political debate at all." Brownell said, "but we saw this as an out and out political endorsement. The difference between what Cathy did and, again, what Doonesbury did is that Doonesbury is satire; the strips we deleted in Cathy didn't use satire. [Guisewite] said herself in the article we ran about this [November 2] that she was using the strip to press these campaign issues.

[No, I think the difference is that Garry Trudeau is a man and has won a Pulitzer Prize and Cathy is a woman and has not]

"We have no trouble with Doonesbury taking pot shots at politicians, but what's different is that she simply made an endorsement," he said.

[Because Garry Trudeau has never, ever, ever endorsed a candidate in his strip. Ever.]

Guisewite was unavailable for comment but, quoted in that Los Angeles Times article, said she did the strips "just to get people talking about women's issues in relationship to the candidates."

"I'm glad I did it," she said."I knew going in that I ran the risk of alienating some readers [but] it was important enough... to weather the alienation."

Political Espousal. The outcry centered around editors' anger at not being forewarned, and their belief that Guisewite departed far afield from the spirit and traditional content of her strip. "We thought she was being unfair and that she double-crossed us," said Indianapolis Star Managing Editor Lawrence S. Connor. Although Connor didn't pull any of the strips ("I pulled the Doonesbury strip in the '80 campaign and got so much negative reaction - 900 calls by noon! - that I learned my lesson"), he complained to UPS and wrote a personal letter to Guisewite.

"Cathy has been a good strip about young, single women and suddenly we had a blatant piece of political espousal," Connor said. "I mean, you see, you buy certain things for certain reasons and you come to count on that. I mean, the syndicate didn't even give us forewarning of any kind. Now, OK, Doonesbury and Bloom County are very political - and I understand that and I expect that, but not from Cathy, not like this."

Connor said the Star ran a story explaining that the paper "didn't endorse what she was doing with the strip" and an editorial "a couple of days later saying we didn't think much of what she was doing.

Paul McAuliffe, managing editor of Indiana's Evansville Courier (which endorsed Bush), didn't think much of what Guisewite was doing either. "We felt that she was campaigning for Dukakis and we didn't feel that was appropriate," he said. "We don't have objections to comic strips having a point of view or poking fun at political candidates - of course, Doonesbury does that - but we feel that in other strips we run, and in strips we don't run, there's an attempt to be even-handed. These were certainly more strident than what we'd come to expect from Cathy."

McAuliffe called the strips "diatribes, directed solely at one party" and said he replaced six of the strips with 1984 Cathy episodes.

"There were four in all that I thought were particularly offensive, targetting the Republicans, campaigning for Dukakis," McAuliffe said. "I felt all the stuff she mentioned was debatable. Obviously, I think, the other side would have had some countervailing arguments."

McAuliffe said forewarning might have helped in "giving us some running room rather than having to deal with a fait accompli" but that he would have moved or dropped the "objectionable" strips in any case.

Syndicate's View. UPS' Salem said the syndicate rarely offers advance notice of a strip's content.

"Traditionally, we do not notify client newspapers on our feeling about a sequence or columns though a lot of editors have requested that we do," he said.

Salem said the strips had been discussed at length at the syndicate before their release, and that he believed they were "strong but worthwhile" and that Andrea had been balanced by other characters such as Andrea's boyfriend, who closed his door on her, saying. "Come back when you have fair, non-partisan, non-subjective facts." " Salem also said Cathy had not entirely broken character.

"The strip has dealt in the past, sometimes lightly and also not so lightly, with important issues. We believed these strips were not out of the parameters of the strip over the last 12 years," he said, "though I can see how a lot of editors would think that.

"But I'm not sure it's fair to expect any comics artist to keep doing the same exact thing they've done for 12 years without some growth."

Speech vs. Commercialism? Asked if editors' decisions to pull Cathy was an instance of purchasers' rights outweighing a cartoonist's right of expression, Salem chuckled. "Well, I see it more as what my friends say is an impractical view, an aesthetic view," he said. "I think comic strips can be more valuable to news readers, and this is one way they can do it.

"The word censorship has not come up here." Salem said. "We support newspaper editors' right to edit their material. But some of the complaints I've heard from editors is that they didn't read the strips before they ran them but wished they had so they might have known to pull them. This smacks of accepting comics as necessary but unimportant little corner of the newspaper. I believe comics, as readers have proven, are a vital, important part of the paper.

"Political commentary is an area that has yet to be fully explored in comic strips -- and I mean by that not by strips but as an editorial approach to strips and the comics page," Salem said. "This kind of reaction takes the risk out of comics and I'm not sure that's a real healthy thing. In the last 20 years, comics have become really topical and to take those topical cartoons when they might move deeper into politics for a week or two off the comics page hurts the artform, frankly.

"We take the position that we'd rather the editors put strips on the Op-Ed pages than drop it altogether so at least people get the chance to see it and make a decision for themselves." he said, "but, still, to my mind, Doonesbury is a comic strip, not a political cartoon. He belongs on the comics page."

Editor's View. The Los Angeles Times' Brownell took the editors' view.

"Our decision [to drop Cathy] begs us to answer the question, 'What is the role of the comics page,' and what kind of editorial policy we exercise at this great bastion of the First Amendment," he said. "Everybody's got their First Amendment rights, and cartoonists certainly have the right to endorse political candidates, but that doesn't mean we have to run that endorsement.

"We don't want to turn the comics page into a political advertisement." Brownell said. "If a fashion writer wanted to write a piece for the fashion page about why Bush should be President, I'd tell her 'No way' - or I'd take her to the City Desk.

"In some sense, yes, the comics page should be the comics page and not the Op-Ed page. The line is the difference between dealing with political matter with wit and humor and elegance or being overtly political," he said. "Promoting one candidate -- that's where we draw the line."

[This entire thing is so incredibly sexist that I don't even know how to take any of these editors seriously. They keep bringing up Doonesbury... and they act like Trudeau didn't run a two months long story leading up to the election about George Bush and Dan Quayle being utter doofuses and unfit for the presidency and Dukakis being fairly normal and reasonable. This had nothing to do with her being "overtly political." It had everything to do with her being a woman and them not expecting that kind of thing out of her because of their sexist notions of what she should be like.]