Out with the News...

I started taking photographs of each year's newspaper headlines way back at the end of 1973 as a way of making bookmarks in my photo albums. Lately, with fewer newspapers being published, and some of the remaining ones reserving the front page for local stories, I've had to resort to pasting together screen grabs — which at least makes available those world headlines that U.S. papers relegate to page 6B.

That said, here's my collage for 2025:

Wishing you all better news in 2026,

―Paul

Let's Fix That Headline, Shall We?

Absolutely Corrupt President Donald Joffrey Trump went before the United Nations General Assembly yesterday and delivered an unhinged, hour-long rant; and somehow, Americans from Alabama to Wyoming can still wake up to this anodyne headline in their morning paper.

A kudos or two goes to the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel for hitting closer to the mark, but my collage above doesn't quite include all the cookie cutter front pages of whatever vulture capitalist corporation owns these ten newspapers.

But I thought I'd help out any of them planning to put out a second edition today.

Q Toon: Cancel Culture

The odd couple of Liberal Leo and MAGA Max make their third appearance this week, telling a vote canvasser that they had both cast their ballots early. (I had to script their dialogue so that it would work in case the deadline for early voting had passed in the locales where they might be published. Originally, I had the canvasser herself promoting early voting.)

My better half and I have already voted, which has done nothing to stop the instant messages, phone calls, and hysterically desperate emails hounding us to vote, volunteer, and THIS IS THE FIFTEENTH TIME WE'VE WRITTEN YOU TO SEND US MONEY!

(No it isn't. I delete 100+ such requests every freaking day.)

In the final panel of this week's cartoon, Leo and Max reference the decision imposed by the owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to spike editorials by their respective editorial boards endorsing Kamala Harris for President. Thus granting tacit equivalence to the candidacies of center-leftist Harris and fascist, racist, extremist grifter Donald Berzelius Trump, the decisions by Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong have resulted in a deluge of subscriber cancelations in protest.

Soon-Shiong’s daughter claims that her father’s diktat comes in protest of the Biden administration’s supplying weaponry to Israel in spite of its on-going wholesale slaughter of Palestinians. Fair enough.

But the chances of a Harris administration reining in Mr. Netanyahu, while slim, are much greater than a second Trump administration doing so. The first Trump administration’s only action regarding the Palestinian problem was sending his son-in-law to sit down with Netanyahu and draw up the Palestinians’ terms of surrender.

For his part, Bezos had the Post publish his excuse for killing its endorsement editorial. As I understand it, he's just returning the Post a simpler, more innocent time before color television when it didn't make such endorsements. And pay no attention to the corporate interests behind the curtain.

He did not explain why this sudden policy change came a mere eleven days before Election Day — as opposed to eleven months ago — or even eleven weeks ago when the Post editorial board was writing editorials essentially calling upon President Biden to drop out of the race for the good of the nation.

(I apologize to those of you among the 200,000 who canceled their Washington Post subscriptions this week for those three links to articles you cannot read. I still value its news department's reporting too much to cancel mine, not to mention the wit and wisdom of such as Ann Telnaes, Eugene Robinson, Alexandra Petri, and Dana Milbank. They can't all have their own substacks, can they?)

Anyway, to nobody's surprise, Trump is now telling his devoted minions, “The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and all these papers, they’re not endorsing anybody. You know what they’re really saying — because they only endorse Democrats — they’re saying this Democrat’s no good. They’re no good. And they think I’m doing a great job. They just don’t want to say it.”

So, Bezos, ya wanna try writing another op-ed about how when they came for democracy, you said nothing, because you weren't a Democrat?

This Week's Sneak Peek

Had enough upside-down flag cartoons yet?

Well, tough. 

As it happens, I was out of town for a family wedding over the weekend. An old friend of my husband's lives in the area near the wedding, so I drew this week's cartoon early in case we had the opportunity to stop by for a visit. (The visit didn't work out, but at least it wasn't because I was anxious to get home to my drawing board.)

At the end of every year since 1972, I've taken a photo of the year's front page headlines. One of this year's major front page stories was in Friday's newspapers (you may have heard of it), and I very much wanted to pick up a copy of the local paper.

Couldn't find one.

Not very long ago, one used to find a small stack of newspapers in the lobby of one's hotel, free as part of the cost of one's room. Once upon a time, it would be the local newspaper; then somehow every hotel agreed to stock USA Today. Now they don't even offer that. The young men at the front desk didn't even know where a newspaper might be sold.

Newspaper vending machines are a thing of the past now that the cost of a newspaper is well above the amount of change anyone carries in their pocket. There were no newspapers at the nearby gas station; the clerk told me that they only sold the paper on Sunday. Nor were there any newspapers at the nearest grocery store. The nearby Shoppe-ing Centre had a bookstore; no newspaper there. Maybe I should have checked any of the half a dozen coffee shoppes, but I wasn't in need of half a dozen overpriced cups of coffee.

Yesterday, I saw the premiere post on a new substack by fellow cartoonist Jack Ohman, writing from vacation in Hawai'i about trying to get away from the news. Yet, in spite of that, he apparently had no trouble in paradise coming up with a copy of the local paper.

From https://jackohman.substack.com/p/on-vacation-with-donald-trump

Was it because he was in a Blue State where they get their news from, well, the news, and I was in a Red State where they get their news from Trump Social?

The Six Chix Contretemps

We're having a conversation in cartoonist circles about Six Chix this week. It's a daily newspaper comic strip which six female cartoonists take turns drawing. Last Tuesday's episode by Bianca Xunise provoked such reader outrage that several newspapers immediately dropped the strip from their comics page and demanded an apology.

"Six Chix" by Bianca Xunise, for King Features Syndicate, July 28, 2020

I was preoccupied with family matters that day, but I did notice the cartoon showing up on Facebook. Knowing nothing about where it came from, I passed it off as the sort of thing some Trump fans in my Facebook feed might think was pwning some libs. It didn't strike me as particularly humorous; dang near none of the anti-BLM and anti-mask memes do.

Once the Daily Cartoonist started reporting on the controversy, I learned that Xunise is a black woman, and that she meant the cartoon to be critical of the white woman speaking to the woman in the "I Can't Breathe" t-shirt. I also learned that Xunise apparently doesn't understand how anyone could misinterpret her cartoon, even though I am clearly not the only person who did.

To put it another way, let's rework the cartoon I posted last week.

I'm not going to pretend that there wasn't any room for improvement in this cartoon, but I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who mistook this as a cartoon in defense of citizens' rights not to wear a mask in public.

The cartoon is loaded with cues that are intended to combine to portray the maskless guy in a negative light. He is grotesquely distorted; there are little red dots spewing out of his mouth; the store employee is blown back by the force of his shouting; and to top it off, there's another character telling the reader that Mad Whitey is full of crap and dangerous to boot.

Here's the same cartoon, redrawn in the tone of the July 28 Six Chix strip:

Casual readers probably would not be able to tell which of the two characters in the cartoon they were supposed to sympathize with. Take out the first two sentences of the dialogue, and readers might assume that the cartoon is critical of officious millennial store managers.

If you have visited my blog before, you know generally where I'm coming from on most issues. If you've met me in the past four months or so, you've seen me wearing my mask in public.

But readers who pay little attention to the editorial (or back) pages where my cartoons appear, or who happen to see my cartoon shared or retweeted by some peripheral on-line acquaintance, don't know anything about me. The pink triangle gives a clue, but I could be a Senegalese woman with a poster of Glenn Beck in my bedroom and a basement full of guns for all they know. They have no reason to know what they are supposed to read into a cartoon other than what is in it.

It's not like I've never drawn cartoons that have been misinterpreted. That usually happens when I've stewed over and played with an idea so long that I forget that the reader hasn't been thinking along the same lines as me before seeing my cartoon.

The point is to learn from one's mistakes, apologize as necessary, and move on to make completely different mistakes.

On the internet, nobody knows when you're only kidding. No wonder the sarcastrophe is such an immensely popular punctuation mark.

At any rate, I'm not saying that Ms. Xunise needed to turn Mrs. Take That Silly Mask Off into a screeching homunculus. I imagine that's not her style. But I do think her cartoon would have been immensely improved and would still be running in those short-sighted editors' papers if she had allowed the woman in the mask to have a witty rejoinder.

The State of Local Journalism

John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" had a good segment on the sorry state of newspaper journalism Sunday night. Newspapers are slashing staffs and discounting investigative journalism and simple monitoring of government in favor of clickbait ("You'll Never Believe What Happened Next!") and incomprehensible marketing buzzwords.

The cost-cutting affects every aspect of the business from writing to production.

On the same day, someone traveling around Wisconsin might have noticed an eerie similarity on several different newspapers' front pages, as shown in this screen shot from newseum.org. Not only did the Fond du Lac Reporter, Green Bay Press Gazette, Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter, Oshkosh Northwestern, Sheboygan Press and Wausau Daily Herald run the same feature story on page one with the same graphic and layout, they also all used the same photo of Brett Favre in the same spot on top of the page to tease the story of his induction into the Football Hall of Fame.

The colored circles might put you in mind of what national newspaper owns these six.

But Not Here

How do you, as an editor at a major newspaper in your state, put Wednesday's front page together when your state is an outlier on "Super Tuesday"?

2014 in Review

It's time for my annual snapshot of the Year In Front Pages, which is embiggenable if enclickulated:

Newspaper front pages don't necessarily reflect the same news as the 24-hour news channels; a single headline seldom adequately encapsulates events that unfold over an extended period of time, such as this year's protests against police tactics, or the unsuccessful search for a missing plane.

Also, the ones I have access to tend to be Yankee-centric --hence "U.S. Ramps Up Fight on Ebola" and the lack of banner headlines about elections in India or the gunman who attacked the Canadian Parliament.

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by to read my little drawings this year. Best wishes, and we'll see you bright and early in 2015!

2013 in review

At the close of every year for the last four decades, I've taken a picture of newspaper headlines from the year gone by. These pictures originally served as a sort of bookmark in my photo albums, back when using rolls of film limited the number of pictures I'd take, and I'd put every photo into an album.

I don't do that with my thousands of digital photos, but I've kept up the habit of taking these headline photos. Here's to 2013:

You can click on the photo to embiggenify it; even then, that New York Times headline about the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1964 is pretty tiny.

In closing, if your 2013 has been in any way less than you had hoped, I wish you a happier and brighter new year.

Benedict Who?

I went out this morning (and yesterday morning) in search of a newspaper with a good headline about Pope Benedict's abdication for my annual Year In Headlines photo, and  I didn't find one. (Oh, to have access to the Philadelphia, Tampa or Yankton, S.D. newspapers, alas.) The announcement came too late for yesterday morning's newspapers, and way too early for today's.

The local newspaper, the Racine Journal Times, chose to lead with a local story about a candidate for Superintendent of Schools. Since the abdication itself was yesterday's news, other area papers ran follow-up headlines. The Kenosha News, which can be counted on to run an old-fashioned bold, large, sans serif banner headline every day, had something along the lines of BENEDICT LED CHURCH IN CHANGING TIMES, which, while true of Benedict XVI, could also be said of every Pope since Leo X.

USA Today and the Milwaukee and Chicago papers lead with headlines looking beyond the resignation itself to speculation about what comes next. Again, true enough, but eleven months from now, you're not going to remember where you were when you found out that a new pope would lead the church at a crossroads.

Which left me with the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, whose headlines state the fact of the abdication plainly and succinctly, if not in a point size that will be legible at the upper left corner of the year-end photograph.

It's just too bad that I can't get the New York tabloids around here.

2012 in Headlines

Newsmagazines have made further inroads into this year's edition of my annual photograph of newspaper headlines.

While I've always had a row of magazines along the top, and have occasionally filled in the sides of the photo with magazines as well, there were some stories this year that just didn't make big headlines in my neck of the woods: easing of military dictatorship in Myanmar, for example, or election of a new leader in China.

And my hometown newspaper doesn't appear at all; the Racine Journal Times increasingly highlights local stories atop page one. And while they did scoop the Kenosha News by a day on Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, the JT had to cram the story in as a two-column story on the edge of the page -- hardly legible in photos such as this one.

It's hard enough to read the Financial Times banner headline about François Hollande's election in France. That story didn't get as prominent play in the other newspapers available in my area, however. I remember buying this particular paper at the local Barnes & Noble; the cashier remarked that it was the first copy of the Financial Times she had ever seen anyone buy there.

Q Toon: AP Style

Last month, the Associated Press announced that it would no longer use the word "homophobia" in news articles. Contrary to my cartoon, the alternative verbiage is reportedly "antigay," which no doubt upsets those lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons who feel left out by the word "gay" because they believe that "gay" refers exclusively to gay men.

On the other hand, congratulations to all you lesbian, bisexual and transgendered purists. With the end of "homophobia," you're now universally accepted and respected!

Of course, one could argue that "homophobia" excluded bisexuals and the transgendered, too. But the problem, according to the AP, was not the "homo" but the "phobia" in the word.

AP Deputy Standards Editor Dave Minthorn told Politico that “homophobia” is often “off the mark” as a descriptor. “It's ascribing a mental disability to someone, and suggests a knowledge that we don't have,” Minthorn said.

While "antigay" may serve as an adequate alternative to the adjective "homophobic," it doesn't quite do the job of replacing the noun "homophobia," however. When Ricky Martin spoke at a recent U.N. conference against homophobia, the AP reported it as such. That is what the conference was called, after all; how could the AP have reported it as a conference on antigaiety?

2011 in Headlines

For 40 years now, I've been marking the end of each year by taking a picture of newspaper front pages and magazine covers from the previous year. Originally they served as a sort of bookmark in my photo albums; nowadays, the only photos I print out for putting in albums are the best ones from vacations, but I've kept up the habit anyway.

The choice of reviewing a year this way tends to skew what stories are included. The Greek default crisis, for example, didn't make banner headlines in the newspapers in my corner of America. Silvio Berlusconi's resignation wasn't the top story of November 8 as far as midwestern editors were concerned, either. The independence of South Sudan was below the fold, if not on a back page.

Stock market plunges and rises in unemployment make headlines; economic recovery (or stagnation) rarely does. The end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"? Almost a non-event once it finally happened. Marriage equality in New York? I don't get any New York newspapers here. Well, I can find the New York Times, but their headlines are seldom legible in these photographs.

Disasters usually make headlines, unless they happen on a Saturday night after the Sunday paper has gone to print. Monday's headline may be something tangential, such as "President Promises Aid Package." Even if the disaster is fresh, my local newspaper figures everyone has already heard about it on cable news and Facebook, so its headline is either the number of dead (in spite of the fact that the number is bound to have changed between press time and finding the paper on your doorstep) or some pull quote like "It Was Terrible!"

Other stories unfold over the course of several months. As significant as were Wisconsin's protests against Governor Walker and his Republican putsch -- and similar protests in Ohio -- and the Occupy protests -- it seems unfair to give them the same weight as the protests in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. (To say nothing of the protests in Bahrain, Yemen, and those in Tunisia that sparked them all... and these headlines indeed say nothing about them.) Time's "Person of the Year" cover will have to suffice.

This Week's Q Syndicate cartoon

Window Media LLC / Unite Media suddenly shuttered its LGBT newspapers last week, including the 40-year-old Washington Blade, our newspaper of record in the nation's capital.

The good news is that the staff of the affected publications have busted their buns to put out new product under new flags.