Cav Daily Cartoon Controversy (Again)

The last time cartoons in The Cavalier Daily poked fun at the Virgin Mary, Bill O'Reilly lambasted them for it in front of a national audience. Two cartoons published in the paper last week seem to indicate that they're feeling starved for conservative vitriol.

The editors have removed the cartoons in question from their web site, but I managed to find copies of them.

The cartoons are from a comic strip called TCB, and they were published on Thursday and Friday of last week.

I didn't even see the cartoons when they published, but over the weekend they kept coming up in conversation, so I decided to look into it. At least a few students have already complained to the Cav Daily about it, with the famously not gay Alex Cortes taking the lead.

The paper released a statement on its web site regarding the cartoons, expressing regret for any offense taken by readers and noting that cartoons published in the paper represent only the opinions of their authors. It also adds that while the cartoons met the paper's criteria for publication, they're considering revising that policy. They have not apologized.

The most important element of the current policy is that cartoons can poke fun at people for their ideas or beliefs but not for traits they can't change about themselves. For example, these cartoons joking about Christianity satisfy the policy, but last fall's infamous Ethiopian Food Fight cartoon, which essentially made fun of starving Africans, didn't fly and thus drew an actual apology.

While the cartoon's offensiveness is probably limited to the devout, they clearly push the envelope of taste. And, given the statement on the paper's web site, they're obviously having some publisher's remorse.

In my opinion, the paper should never shy away from publishing controversial viewpoints even when they have the potential to generate a lot of heat. But these cartoons don't convey a viewpoint; they just aim to offend and hope to produce some humor as a by-product (not very successfully, I might add). The paper's editors should really have a mechanism to weed this stuff out. Putting your lack of taste on display only alienates readers, and it happens often enough to give the paper a bad reputation for something that has nothing to do with its news-gathering abilities. They could fix that with by altering their comics policy to allow editors to decide whether what they're about to publish meets their own minimal standards of taste.

It's not censorship if the person you censor isn't actually saying anything.