New York Post “apologizes” for chimpanzee cartoon
The New York Post has apologized for the chimpanzee cartoon. If you consider what follows to be an apology. Under an online headline “That Cartoon,” the Post offers:
Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon - caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut - has created considerable controversy.
It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” one officer says.
It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.
Period.
But it has been taken as something else - as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.
This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.
However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past - and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.
To them, no apology is due.
Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon - even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.
In an interview with CNN, the cartoonist himself didn’t sound very contrite. What follows is from an Everyday Ethics article — “What standards did Delonas consider when drawing cartoon” — by Bob Steele on Poynter.org:
The cartoonist, Sean Delonas, denies that he was targeting President Barack Obama and says he did not mean to imply that the nation’s first African-American President is a monkey. CNN reports:
Delonas, the cartoonist, said to CNN, “It’s absolutely friggin ridiculous. Do you really think I’m saying Obama should be shot? I didn’t see that in the cartoon. The chimpanzee was a major story in the Post. Every paper in New York, except The New York Times, covered the chimpanzee story. It’s just ridiculous. It’s about the economic stimulus bill. If you’re going to make that about anybody, it would be [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi, which it’s not.”
The New York Times reported the apology last night in an article that tells of growing protests to the Post.
The Times’ summation of the controversy:
The cartoon has been widely criticized as making an implicit comparison between the chimpanzee - a reference to a chimpanzee that was shot to death by a police officer in Connecticut on Monday after it attacked a friend of its owner - and President Obama, who signed the stimulus package into law on Tuesday.
By the way, here’s Steele’s answer to the ethics question:
The Post and Delonas may have evoked emotion and provoked response with the chimpanzee cartoon. But I’m seeing no evidence they had a justifiable ethical decision-making process or that they applied core ethical values to their actions.
(1 votes, average: 1 out of 5)
Loading ...
Steve Parker is the deputy managing editor for news, and oversees the Post-Dispatch's front page. STLtoday's online news editors are on his newsroom team. Parker has been at the paper since September 1980. 
The headline at MSNBC.com irked me this morning. It said the Post apologized for it’s “Obama” cartoon. It wasn’t an Obama cartoon. It’s that kind of misleading stuff by the media that makes people think they have an agenda.
On to the actual item of interest, this wasn’t a very well-thought out decision to write and publish this thing. I believe the cartoonist when he says it wasn’t a shot at Obama, but given St. Barack’s work on the Porkulus Package, someone at the Post should have realized that it wouldn’t be a big jump to see a racist connotation with this cartoon.
Sometimes people just don’t see the bull in the china shop even though it is standing right in front of them.
Unfortunately, I fear that episodes like this are going to be a regular event for the next four years in this country, given a black president and the racial tension that exists in this country…
They should apologize to all the chimps in the world. Comparing them to politicians. Now THAT is an insult!
LOL
The ridiculous and spurious accusations of racism regarding this cartoon show that the mainstream media is not ready for a serious discussion of race.
………..I’ll have to subacribe to the NY Post, at least that paper acts like it has half a spine.
I have several questions to ask the New York Post, its parent company, Newscorp who also owns Foxnoise, and Rupert Murdock.
What were you thinking when you let the editorial cartoon of a dead monkey with two cops saying, “They’ll have to get someone else to write the next stimulus bill,”? If you’d asked a hundred people, before the Murdock spin machine got hold of the aftermess of this and tried to claim it wasn’t meant to be a racist insult to our new President, “How many of you think that this is a racist insult to our new President?” Every hand, of a reasonably intelligent person would have gone up.
How did you not see this being a very big controversy? What were you smoking? What is wrong with you?
I know a newspaper editor. I know people who work in the editorial staff of newspapers. No intelligent person would have looked at this, even with a cursory glance, would have thought that it wasn’t racially motivated. You can get all of Rupert’s minions to go on spin-cycle to try to make it less than it really is, but reasonable persons, that is persons with brains, will think it otherwise.
The cartoon could not have been about Mr. Obama. Presidents do not write bills. Congress writes the bills. Anyone with basic understanding of how our Constitution operates would realize this. Those decrying the cartoon are ignorant of the US Constitution and the political reality in Washington, DC.
This is a lot like when I was listening to talk radio on my way home from work, and the discussion I tuned into was about the morality and legality of torture. This was about four years ago. I thought I’d have to pull off onto the side of the road to puke.
Chimps are violent horrifically strong animals. For years the everything-not-human-is-noble crowd tried to promote them as being admirable–mostly through their vague similarity to us and due to the chimp genetic narrative having all the same words as ours–though of course the story each tells is very very different.
Then the truth started to come out–they’re violent, they wage war, they rape, they murder. What’s a human-hater to do for ammunition to sling at humanity?
The stimulus legislation and it’s promoters are like the chimps–taken originally to be objects of admiration but as the truth gradually comes out that there is no free lunch, they will be seen for what they are. The comparison of them to chimps is nothing to be apologized for.
The actual cartoonist ought to have been trotted out for the defense against the disingenuous critics–not one of whom was ever heard to utter one word against an overt unmistakable comparison between our last President and simians–and here’s what he ought to have said instead of the weak apology to some of those supposedly offended:
If I ever draw a cartoon comparing Obama to any animal, it will be unmistakable and I will include clear elements of Obama’s typical public appearance so there will be no ambiguity. Take your meds, you’ll imagine many fewer things which are not really there–that’s what the meds are for, ya twits.
They didn’t do it, so I just did it for them.
After all, I don’t have any advertisers to lose or any subscribers to cancel.
Look. The chimp in the cartoon was not smoking. It wasn’t on a basketball court. There were no secret-service chimps piled on top of it to protect it in case it was still alive. The chimp’s hideously ugly mate wearing some overpriced hunk-of-crap clothing was not lurking nearby. Ergo, the chimp was not meant to resemble POTUS #44.
Creating this non-issue is only the latest indication from the Oprahbama-bots that his having “hit the ground running”–in circles like roaches when you turn the light on in the kitchen at midnight ( for the benefit of the typical Oprahbamabot, so you’ll have an image you’re all familiar with, you losers) is something in-need of covering up with made-up controversies having nothing to do with anything.
Cartoonist, Sean Delonas obviously himself can’t seem to find an explanation that makes any sense to why he drew that cartoon but will only say it is ridiculous to think that he was depicting shooting Obama and denies that he was depicting Obama as a monkey. But, he can find enough FOOLS out here to tell us what he was depicting when he cannot and this includes the New York Times who is stating:
“The cartoon’s goal, according to a Post spokeswoman, was mocking government officials in their financial rescue efforts.”
When intelligent people cannot make anymore sense than this, THEY ARE LYING! They are just PLAIN LYING!
But, go ahead defending a grown man who cannot even rationally defend himself and it is not as if this cartoonist is not of normal mental capacity but I question the mental capacity of people within the public attempting to defend and tell why this grow man drew the cartoon when he can’t even come up with an explanation that makes sense himself and neither do none of your excuses make sense, but good attempts, I will give you all that. What jokes you ones are. (Lol).