Picture Forming Of Newspapers Handling Doonesbury Abortion Strips



I don't have a clear picture yet as to how many newspapers are dropping a controversial Doonesbury sequence on Texas abortion law, but Michael Cavna's impeccable coverage named a few in last week and there are others popping up like the Athens Banner-Herald. The Banner-Herald has an interesting reason: they don't want their readers to confuse it with Georgia law under consideration right now. That's novel, although I'm not sure that doesn't have scarier implications for the newspaper's view of its readers than if they were bouncing it for broader reasons.

I'm never quite sure what the reasoning is behind not carrying this kind of material. This isn't a case where Trudeau is suddenly using his platform in an exploitative or unsavory fashion; Garry Trudeau has been Garry Trudeau for decades now. I would think that anyone reading a newspaper in this day and age would be able to process the viewpoint Trudeau expresses; I can't imagine there are even kids that if they can read and understand Doonesbury will be dismayed by Doonesbury. In many ways, the newspapers kind of dancing around the issues or even going full-on substitution suggests that certain topics won't be discussed in certain ways, or that the papers feel they have a certain kind of reader that wants no part of such discussions at all. Neither one of those options is very appealing.
 
posted 7:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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