HuffPo: NY Post Fires Editor Critical Of Racist Obama-Stimulus Cartoon
October 06, 2009 7:54 pm ET by Karl Frisch
The Huffington Post's Sam Stein reported this afternoon that the New York Post has confirmed that an "editor who spoke out against a controversial cartoon the paper ran comparing the author of the president's stimulus package to a dead chimpanzee has been fired from her job."
More from Stein's report:
Sandra Guzman was quietly dismissed from her position as associate editor last week for reasons that are being hotly debated by personnel inside the company. An official statement from the New York Post, provided to the Huffington Post, said that her job was terminated once the paper ended the section she was editing.
"Sandra is no longer with The Post because the monthly in-paper insert, Tempo, of which she was the editor, has been discontinued."
Employees at the paper -- which is one of media mogul's Rupert Murdoch's crown jewels -- said the firing, which took place last Tuesday, seemed retributive.
Guzman was the most high-profile Post employee to publicly speak out against a cartoon that likened the author of the stimulus bill (whom nearly everyone associated with President Barack Obama) with a rabid primate. Drawn by famed cartoonist Sean Delonas, the illustration pictured two befuddled policeman -- having just shot the chimp twice in the chest -- saying: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
"I neither commissioned or approved it," Guzman wrote to a list of journalist colleagues shortly thereafter. "I saw it in the paper yesterday with the rest of the world. And, I have raised my objections to management."
The remark from Guzman was a rare instance of dissension within the halls of the paper making its way into the public domain. And sources at the Post now say it cost her a job.
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Huffpost:
In it, two befuddled-looking police officers holding guns look over the dead and bleeding chimpanzee that attacked a woman in Stamford, Connecticut.
CNN:
The cartoon showed two police officers standing over the body of a chimpanzee they just shot, a reference to this week's mauling of a Connecticut woman by a pet chimp, which police killed after the attack.
ABC News:
The Sean Delonas drawing morphs together two stories in the news this week -- the Obama administration's economic stimulus bill and the pet chimp that police shot to stop his attack on a Connecticut woman.
MSNBC (sourcing AP):
In a statement, Post Editor-in-Chief Col Allan said: "The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut."
New York Times:
The chimpanzee was an apparent reference to the 200-pound pet chimpanzee that was shot dead by a police officer in Stamford, Conn., on Monday evening, after it mauled a friend of his owner.
And again, New York Times:
The cartoon by Sean Delonas, published last Wednesday, combined two high-profile recent news events: the story of a pet chimpanzee that ran amok in Connecticut and Congress's approval of a $787 billion economic stimulus bill.
CBS News:
The cartoon refers to Travis the chimp, who was shot to death by police in Stamford, Connecticut, on Monday after it mauled a friend of its owner.
NPR:
The cartoon appears to spoof yesterday's police shooting of a raging chimpanzee in Connecticut and President Obama signing his billion-dollar stimulus bill into law.
Chicago Tribune:
The allusion to the police shooting of a pet chimp in New Jersey caught the ire of the Rev. Al Sharpton, commentator Roland Martin and others.
LA Times:
Like many editorial cartoonists, Sean Delonas lamely juxtaposed a political story (the stimulus program approved by Congress and signed by President Obama) and a non-political sensation (the mauling of a Connecticut woman by a chimpanzee, who was later shot to death by police).
Washington Post:
Today's New York Post cartoon by Sean Delonas -- which references both the stimulus bill and the Connecticut news story about a chimp that was shot after mauling a woman -- has stirred the kind of controversy that perhaps no illustration since Barry Blitt's New Yorker magazine cover last summer has.
So I guess your take is that by relying on a link instead, Sam Stein is hoping that people who were living under a rock last February and missed the snafu will come away without knowing the whole story. I think that's a stretch myself.
Aside from these two, I don't really see many current articles "talking about it now."
Care to share your research?
The point was that the written stimulus was being criticized by many. There were serious doubts and serious debates regarding the matter, and then there was the news story about a woman's chimpanzee attacking her.
So, in order to make sense of the stimulus, the cops in the comic infer that the ape was the author.
Even when the debate was going on, and the comic came out, I saw zero racial undertones. I understood the combination of the two stories, and I did not consider that just because Obama supported the stimulus, and he is black, and apes have been a common racist device in the past, that they must have been talking about Obama.
If the chimp attack never occurred, and the cops shot down an ape, then I would agree that it is racist.
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