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.

This Week's Sneak Peek

It's been a busy weekend. Time to get out, meet up with the madding crowd, and cut loose.

A quick P.S. to yesterday's post: Driving to work today, I noticed another of those "Vote for Ryan and send your job to a foreign country" signs.

It was at the entrance to a German industrial manufacturing company that opened a manufacturing plant and its North American headquarters in my village in 1994. It was bought by a Chinese company in 2012. The plant employs about 200 Americans.

Paul Nehlen's 15 Seconds of Fame

As your representative cartoonist from House Speaker Paul Ryan's congressional district, I've had a front row seat to Tea Partisan Paul Nehlen's challenge to the Congressman in this Tuesday's Republican primary.

Ordinarily, Nehlen's candidacy would find itself desperate for any attention. Wisconsin's First Congressional District is home to no television stations, and the media in the district generally accord non-incumbent congressional candidates the same level of coverage that national media grant to Green and Libertarian candidates.

But then Donald Trump decided he'd pay Ryan back for the Congressman having spent the presidential primary season "just not there yet" to endorse the mercurial business mogul. Trump praised Nehlen for running "a very good campaign" and declared that as far as endorsing the House Speaker, Trump was "just not there yet," either.

Suddenly, Nehlen found himself welcome to appear on national TV to fulminate against Ryan for supposedly supporting porous borders and job-killing trade pacts. California-based liberal pundit Mickey Kaus published an open letter to Wisconsin Democrats to cross over to vote for Nehlen, forsaking the two candidates running for the Democratic nomination.

I don't know of any push by local Democrats to encourage crossover votes for Nehlen, but then I'm not close to anybody who would be behind such a strategy. It would be just desserts for the party that has been free to cross over to vote for the weakest Democrat in every race for the 1st CD seat for the past 20 years.

I do know that a bunch of signs have suddenly cropped up along our highways, printed on Ryan's shade of kelly green (but not in his Gill Extra Bold font) with messages like:

Corporations first! Vote for Ryan.

Open our borders! Vote for Ryan.

Don't be selfish! Vote for Ryan and give your job to a foreign worker. 

Those might well come from the Nehlen campaign, which already had plenty of Vote Nehlen signs festooning our roads, or from a shadowy organization called "AmericaSpeaks" that took a full-page ad for Nehlen in this morning's newspaper. We also got a mailing yesterday paid for by "Volunteers for Nehlen" headlined "Speaker Ryan - Congressman for Beijing." After a series of bullet points using the ¥uan symbol for bullets, the tag line is "Vote August 9 for Speaker Ryan and Make China Great Again!"

Trump finally endorsed Ryan this Friday, which probably carries little or no weight here anyway. Conservative talk radio is solidly pro-Ryan and has hardly warmed to Donald Trump since leading the Never Trump movement in the Wisconsin presidential primary.

To cap off Paul Nehlen's day, he was refused entry to Trump's rally in Green Bay. He accused the state Republican Party of keeping him out of the rally even though he had two tickets to get in, but the state GOP says it was the Trump campaign that turned him away.

A Trump spokesperson supports the Wisconsin GOP version of events.

All Noise on the Eastern Front

You know what country we hardly mentioned in these Salzback Saturday reviews since marking the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand?

Sidney Greene for New York Evening Telegram, August 11, 1916

You would hardly know it to read American history books, but World War I was still going on in the country that declared war first. In August of 1916, Imperial Russia seized Stanislau (then in Austria, but now in Ukraine and called Ivano-Frankivsk), while Italy was advancing on Austria's Adriatic port city of Trieste.

"They That Take the Sword Shall Perish with the Sword" - Wm. C. Morris for Harper's Weekly Independent, August 21, 1916

It's difficult to read some of the labeling in this next cartoon; the jaws of the big nutcracker are labeled "Russians" and "Italians." Oh, by the way: things weren't quiet on the western front, either.

"The Allies' Nut Cracker" by John McCutcheon for Chicago Tribune, August 11, 1916

In the Austrian press, this cartoonist awkwardly tries to put the best face on the loss of Trieste:

"His Majesty the Boy" by Franz Wacik in Die Muskete, Vienna, 1916

Viewed a century later, when we know that Trieste would remain Italian, Franz Wacik's cartoon doesn't make much sense. The pejorative title of the cartoon is also rather curious, given that at 46 years of age, the Italian king was a "boy" only when compared to Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, who turned 86 on August 18 (and died of pneumonia before year's end).

Continental cartoons of the period don't always translate well outside of their original language, especially where they were required to hew to a strict government line. When the propaganda works, it is entirely due to the artwork. Even when it doesn't, the artwork is the cartoon's only saving grace; I think this Russian cartoon falls in that category.

"Your Victorious Troops..." by "Kuk" for Lukomorye, Petrograd (St. Petersburg), 1916

Star Trek - The Lost Episodes

Yesterday's Q Toon did not exactly go where no Q Toon has gone before. Here's your Flashback Friday fix from 2005:

Q Toon: To Seek Out Fabulous New Worlds

We editorial cartoonists are having a lot of difficulty keeping up with Donald Berzilius Trump's barrage of jaw-dropping behavior, so I'm just going to ignore him this week. You're welcome.

In Hollywood hype for the latest Star Trek movie, word got out that Helmsman Hikaro Sulu, played by straight actor John Cho, has a husband in the new film, Star Trek: Beyond. Everyone involved probably intended this as tribute to gay actor George Takei, who originated the role in the 1960's TV series. Takei's reaction must have come as a disappointment.

 "I’m delighted that there’s a gay character," he tells The Hollywood Reporter. "Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate." ... 

"I told [Cho], 'Be imaginative and create a character who has a history of being gay, rather than Sulu, who had been straight all this time, suddenly being revealed as being closeted.'"

Frankly, hardly any of the crew on the original show had a sex life unless Captain Kirk or First Officer Spock were involved, so it doesn't necessarily follow that TV-Sulu was "closeted." As any hardcore Trekkie, Trekker, Trekkoid or Tribble will tell you in animated detail, the only clue to Helmsman Sulu ever having a sex life of any kind comes in Star Trek: Generations (1994), in which Captain Kirk meets Hikaro's daughter Demora on duty as Helmsman of the Enterprise B. (For that matter, Sulu and his husband have a toddler daughter in Beyond as well. It's not as if 23rd Century gay people won't have been raising families for 250 years.)

As far as the "closeted" thing is concerned, you could argue that, at least, Dr. McCoy assumes Sulu is straight at the end of the "Shore Leave" episode. Just don't be alarmed if my eyes glaze over while you do.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Oh, my.