Long-Distance Relationship
Marlette did what good editorial cartoonists are paid to do: he pushed a raging story to its extreme and drew the extreme, letting the chips fall where they might. Since the basis of the raging story is a series of racist comments overheard on fire department radios, not fires in black neighborhoods that white firemen wouldn’t fight, it can be argued that in pursuing the extreme Marlette wandered dangerously far from reality. No matter. What’s indisputably wrong with his picture is something Wycliff didn’t address.
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Marlette lives in North Carolina. He grew up in the south, and he finds his iconic images in the civil rights movement of the south. I suppose he understands Chicago in the same general way that a Chicagoan caught up in March Madness understands Duke University.
The cartoonists I’ve talked to over the years who were tantalized by the Tribune and then blown off believe that Dold, as well as editor Ann Marie Lipinski, wants to hire someone. They sense the invisible hand of bean counters who don’t think paying a cartoonist a salary is a prudent use of resources.
Marlette says he has to work out some details with Dold, but he expects to be drawing at least one cartoon a week for the Tribune, hopefully more. (His second, a forgettable comment on violence against teachers in Chicago’s public schools, ran March 23.) “Doug’s account sounds accurate,” Dold wrote back when I e-mailed him some questions. “This is a work in progress. That’s about all I can say for now.”
On the plus side, “corporate profits have increased or held steady while investments in news-gathering have declined.” The study provided greater solace to someone who regards the media as an investment than to someone who values an informed public and counts on the media to do the informing.
The study went on to observe that the alternative press has created an “increasingly corporatized world” for itself, in which two chains, New Times and Village Voice Media–neither associated with the Reader–between them control 17 papers and the principal weekly in half of the country’s ten largest cities. In short, the study paints a picture of the alternative press as an institutional press, thinly lacquered to look nonconformist.
