23 Papers Refuse Doonesbury Strips

23 PAPERS REFUSE STRIPS

Dan, Drugs, and Doonesbury

Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury has gotten heat over the years for attacking noteworthy figures from Ronald Reagan to Frank Sinatra. But the 22-year-old strip stuck a nerve among sensitive newspaper editors when it launched a series about a public figure somewhat less universally beloved than Sinatra, Vice President Dan Quayle. Twenty-three papers have refused to carry episodes concerning Quayle's alleged past drug experiments and government attempts to keep such allegations quiet. Three small-town papers have dropped the feature altogether.
The series began in the last week of August with strips depicting Quayle (drawn as always, as a disembodied feather) being haunted in his sleep by Mr. Jay, an anthropomorphic marijuana joint (first introduced by Trudeau in 1989 as a companion to Mr. Butts, a talking cigarette, in a series set in Mike Doonesbury's advertising career).
Over the next two weeks, Trudeau delivered a complicated story in a four-panel gag format: that in 1988, during the Presidential election campaign, a convicted Oklahoma felon named Brett Kimberlin claimed he once sold marijuana in the early 1970s to Quayle, then an Indiana University law student. Kimberlin scheduled a prison press conference to discuss his claim, but it was abruptly canceled by prison officials, who now claim the order came from federal authorites with close ties to the Reagan-Bush White House. Justice Department officials kept close watch on Kimberlin and relayed information about his activities to Bush-Quayle campaign leaders. In 1991, Kimberlin sued the government, charging that he was kept in solitary confinement and that the presidentially-appointed U.S. Parole Commission had kept him imprisoned twice as long as the maximum time recommended in its official guidelines.
The Quayle storyline resumed on Nov. 11, with journalist Rick Redfern reiterating the allegations against Quayle, then going to an interview and receiving only evasive responses from the talking feather. This second sequence included a new allegation: that the Drug Enforcement Agency had investigated accusations of cocaine use against first-term Sen. Quayle in 1982, then abruptly closed the file. The agency officially concluded that the charges against Quayle, based on the testimony of a convicted Indianapolis drug dealer, were unsubstantiated. Trudeau wrote that the conclusion might have been the result a of a cover-up order.
Trudeau's Quayle strips became a topic of news articles when the second series was delivered to Doonesbury's 1,000 subscribing papers on Nov. 4, one week before their publication. (Most other comic strips are sent months in advance.) Most of the articles focused on Trudeau's self-appointed role as an "investigative cartoonist," and only mentioned the Quayle/ Kimberlin affair in that context. Many of the articles emphasized the alleged cover-up of Kimberlin's allegations rather than the allegations themselves. Still, Trudeau had succeeded in forcing media attention on the matter.
The papers that refused to carry the second series of Quayle strips included the Atlanta Journal, Dayton Daily News, Columbus Dispatch, Cincinatti Enquirer, and San Jose Mercury News. Rome, NY Daily Sentinel publisher George Waters, in explaining his refusal to publish the series, charged that Trudeau "sometimes goes over the edge in taste and possible libel. I don't want to carry out his personal vendettas." Papers in Greely, CO, Redding, CA, and Rolla, MO dropped Doonesbury altogether. Universal Press Syndicate editorial director Lee Salem said the syndicate was "absolutely" committed to supporting Trudeau's work.
Scripps Howard News Service columnist Leonard Larsen, while calling Quayle "a wind-up politician plopped in the vice president's office on a whim," asserted that any papers that do run the strips "share a guilt of complicity. They ignore the raw unfairness in publication of accusations without proof, or join in the Trudeau pretext that it's really about a "cover-up"... Whatever misdemeanors of political empty-headedness and blow dried intellect Quayle might be accused of, the Trudeau comic strip charges a crime, not only lacking proof but in the face of federal investigators' statements that no proof exists."
Rhode Island, Unread: The Providence, RI Journal not only refused to run the Quayle episodes (expressing the opinion that "we would not allow one of our own reporters to make such charges without proper substantiation"), but exercised the regional-exclusivity clause in its syndicate contract to prevent any other Rhode Island paper from running them. The Newport Daily News tried to pick up the episodes, but as editor David Offer puts it, "the Providence Journal took all kinds of steps to enforce its exclusivity. After four days we stopped running them. We gave in; we're sorry we did."
The complete sequence will be available, as are all Doonesbury dailies, in Comic Relief magazine (Page One Publications, $2.95).
Trudeau Speaks: At a public appearance in Seattle on Nov. 19, Trudeau said that he always gets suspicious when the targets of his satire become too defensive. "The administration's response to the last few weeks of the strip had been to characterize it as a personal attack. But at the risk of sounding like Sonny Corleone, that's my job. I've been doing it for 20 years. I was whacking public figures back while Quayle was whacking golf balls through law school.
"A lot of people acknowledge 'experimenting' with drugs, which I prefer to call 'conducting experiments.' Judge Thomas acknowledged conducting experiments as an undergraduate. Judge Ginsburg acknowledged conducting experiments as a law professor. The irony is, Judge Souter, who didn't conduct experiments, was the only one who could have benefited from the experience. Dan Quayle is the only other person in America who didn't conduct experiments. Mr. Quayle. who attended college in the late 1960's, claims that not only has he never conducted experiments, he does not know anyone who succumbed to the spirit of scientific inquiry. This man claims to represent the people! My question is, which people!" He said that if Quayle would only admit to past drug use, it would probably boost him in most voters' eyes. Instead, Trudeau said, the administration continues to try to cover up the story, with most journalists still "just swallowing the administration line."
Still, he saw hope in the fact that when he started in 1970, many papers refused to even consider running Doonesbury. A Universal editor at the time told him that time would rid him of a generation of publishers who couldn't understand his brand of satire -- "and he was right. The patriarchs began dying and left their papers to their sons who soon bought Doonesbury. A happy pattern was emerging. All around the nation, publishers who said Doonesbury would only appear over their dead bodies were getting their wish.
"There's no denying that satire is an ungentlemanly art," Tredeau said. "It is a one-sided fight... and it's protected by the U.S. Constitution. Unfair? You bet. But that's what makes cartooning such an effective tool for social control." He also noted that he and wife Jane Pauley have had three IRS income tax audits and this year expects to be "the future recipient of the mother of all tax audits... They find our deductions too small to be plausible. People in our income bracket aren't supposed to pay taxes. And here we are, depleting our savings, giving the government money that would otherwise go to the capital markets, where the government could borrow it to cover its deficit."
Public Assistance: Entertainment Weekly thought it had a scandalous revelation of its own when the Time Warner magazine charged that Trudeau doesn't draw the strip and hasn't since its first year of syndication. The magazine claimed that Don Carlton, a freelance artist who works in Kansas City (near Universal Press Syndicate's headquarters), creates the drawings and lettering from nothing more than rough sketches faxed over by Trudeau in New York.
Trudeau and Carlton replied that Carlton's role is no more than that of traditional inker, tracing over Trudeau's faxed pencils. Art assistants, usually anonymous, have been used on comic strips since the early days of the medium. Syndicates have long encouraged strip creators to take on assistants, to help ensure reliable production schedules and to fill in should the official artist take ill.