ByRobert Phiddian
It has been a big year for cartoon controversies. There was the fear that political cartoonists would be muzzled under the new sedition laws delivered for Christmas last year by the Federal Government. Then there was the international uproar over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. Before that entirely settled, relations between Australia and Indonesia were sorely tested by Bill Leak's trademark tastefulness in depicting the Indonesian President sodomising a Papuan. And very recentlyThe Sydney Morning Herald has shown high sensitivity to taste by refusing to run a Leunig cartoon about John Howard that, to my jaded eye, was only averagely scatological.
There is, I think, a growing sensitivity to cartoons' potential impact in public debate. Maybe that is because they are becoming one of the last redoubts for undisciplined, unspun commentary. You might argue that the powers that be could reasonably expect loyalty in time of a war against terror. I don't agree, however, that we are made safer by limiting the organs of dissent.
When I started formally studying political cartoons back in 1996, it looked like a beautifully designed research project. Now it's becoming clear that there's much more to it than that. Cartoons are the hub of the surviving anti-spin and shaming devices in the mainstream media at a time when spin and shamelessness are a ballooning element in public life. Think everything fromBig Brother to the AWB inquiry, from Shane Warne to weapons of mass destruction. Cartoons have increasingly been at the heart of storms over free speech and the pressure from governments, corporations, and opinion-makers to control the message.
The clearest recent example has been the response to the Tampa crisis of 2001 and the subsequent incarceration of asylum seekers. Every one of the hundreds of cartoons I have seen on the topic (in tabloid and broadsheet, metropolitan and regional papers) has advocated more humane treatment for refugees, and none has shown any tolerance of the subtle legalisms spread by ministers and their bureaucrats. Their unanimity clearly had little impact on public opinion, which remained broadly opposed to "illegal immigrants". Still, cartoonists were quite the most ungovernable part of the media on this topic, and remain so. At the very least, they provided support and consolation to those opposed to the policy and its media-managed execution.
Governments have learnt the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate, and corporations the lesson of big tobacco; even churches are beginning to learn the lesson of the Hollingworth saga. We are reaching a stage where the old light-bulb joke could be reworked as: "How many investigative journalists does it take to write a story? One, plus 24 public relations officers and four beautifully presented, if mendacious, information packages." Cartoons are one of the last frontiers for product placement and controlling the message.
Any competent editor knows that a cartoonist's only real responsibility is to be funny and interesting without breaking any laws. The great New Zealand-born cartoonist David Low even managed to get himself onto the Gestapo's hit-list for after the invasion of England by dint of his cartoons attacking Hitler in the 1930s. No amount of Foreign Office pressure on theEvening Standard could get him to tone them down.
The last Australian media proprietor to direct a cartoonist to a topic was Frank Packer back in the 1940s, and the cartoonist, Will Mahoney, preferred to be sacked rather than follow orders. Such fearlessness is now the stuff of legend, and the independence of the cartoonist is widely established in Western nations.
This doesn't mean that newspapers must accept whatever cartoon their artist offers. That would amount to the same level of unqualified privilege enjoyed by members of parliament. Editors can nag cartoonists, refuse particular cartoons, and sack recalcitrants. This is all perfectly sensible and legitimate, but it's also a slippery slope of pressure that must be constantly negotiated.
A cartoon can be a very emotive thing. So far as one can tell from electoral commission surveys, individual cartoons by Leunig or Tandberg have been about as insignificant in directly shifting votes as individual opinion pieces by Robert Manne or Andrew Bolt. But over time, they mark the ethos of the papers they appear in just as strongly, and colour the views of those who choose to be regular readers.
That is why we need to be careful that cartoonists are free to be antsy and difficult, that the pressures out there to make us all disciplined team players in corporate solidarity for the safest return on investors' capital are kept at bay. At present inThe Australian, Bill Leak is cartooning strongly in tune with that paper's crusade against the maintenance of remote Aboriginal communities.
This is just a coincidence of view, and Leak is often at odds with his paper's editorial line, but the coincidence is remarkably powerful. It becomes very hard for a consistent reader of that paper to resist the overall argument that remote communities are beastly. The emotive effect is well in excess of the real evidence led.
The spin doctors out there will be noticing how much cartoonists can add to an argument, and will be thinking of ways to cultivate them, ways of helping them over the fear that dogs them all: that the paper will have to run with a blank space where their cartoon should be. Let them and their editors be warned, and long may they remain uncultivatable.