Today as I was watching the new and saw the cartoon that was on pg 12 of the newyork post I was outraged. Im not sure if this has anything to do with our media class but I just wanted to blog about it because its crazy how a cartoon in a newspaper can cause such a controversy. But to make it short I do think it was racist and just nasty. Its sad to see that racism is still going on and being able to spread their hatred through the media.
Gurewitz Samantha
Feb 20, 2009 1:39 PM
What I find interesting about the whole cartoon outrage is that the cartoon's real problem was that it was so vague. Was the monkey supposed to represent Obama or a senator (who re-wrote most of the bill)? Why were they trying to tie together such unrelated news stories (the chimp who mauled a woman and the stimulus bill)? And did they mean to make a racist statement, implying Obama is a 'monkey' because of his color, or because political cartoon's regularly mock president's by showing them as animals, such as monkeys, and a chimp being shot was the big story of the moment?
I'm not defending the cartoon, they obviously made bad choices, but their biggest offense was being an unclear, unfunny, and generally bad cartoon. What's interesting is not the cartoon, but people's reaction to it. When you look at what the public projects as the 'message' on such a muddled canvas; It obviously reflects what people are most upset about in their own lives. The issues of our time becomes tied to almost everything we see in media, because we're thinking about it and we put it there.