Charlie's death reveals media's worst

“ABC Pulls Jimmy Kimmel Off Air for Charlie Kirk Comments”

Originally, today’s newsletter was supposed to be about cartoonist Chip Bok screwing up with his political cartoon about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. My goodness you don’t depict a man having his head blown off.

I will get to that later in the newsletter, but Jimmy Kimmel had to make an ass of himself by mocking the reaction of MAGA and President Trump to Charlie’s death.

How bad was it, Donnie?

It was so bad that ABC yanked him from the air immediately. The New York Times reported:

“ABC Pulls Jimmy Kimmel Off Air for Charlie Kirk Comments”

ABC announced on Wednesday evening that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show “indefinitely” after criticism of comments he made on Monday about the motives of the man who is accused of fatally shooting the conservative activist Charlie Kirk last week.

Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chair, sharply criticized Mr. Kimmel’s comments on a podcast earlier on Wednesday.

Nexstar, an owner of many local stations throughout the United States, said shortly before ABC’s announcement that it was pre-empting episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live! for the “foreseeable future.”

“Nexstar strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets,” the company said.

Who in the hell slams the victim of an assassin and his supporters?

No one on national TV joked about JFK’s assassination. No one on national TV joked about MLK’s assassination. No one on national TV joked about RFK’s assassination.

Stuff the free speech argument. None of Kimmel’s supporters seem bothered that Charlie Kirk did not lose his job over free speech. He lost his life.

Two years ago, Jimmy Kimmel celebrated Fox for firing Tucker Carlson. Earlier, he celebrated ABC firing Roseanne Barr.

Your rules, our turn.

As an aside, Power Line reported, “Donald Trump has sued the New York Times and others for defamation, alleging damages of $15 billion.”

Bad move. NYT doesn’t have $15 billion.

Now on to Bok’s cartoon.

“The odd thing about assassins, Dr. King, is they think they killed you,” political cartoonist Bill Mauldin wrote beneath his depiction of Mahatma Gandhi welcoming Martin Luther King to heaven following King’s assassination in 1968.

The cartoon was respectful of both men and a beam of hope in a dark time. The murder of the non-violent King would trigger riots whose scars remained for a generation.

The King-Gandhi assassination cartoon was perfect. Both men were men of peace who died at the hands of monsters.

Mauldin’s greatest cartoon was the Lincoln Memorial sobbing following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

JFK’s murder overwhelmed the nation. We were crushed. People who had survived the Great Depression and won World War II were shell-shocked. Mauldin, a member of that generation who had been on the frontlines in Europe, understood how everyone felt.

Cartoons are the most important part of an editorial page. I say this after 26 years of editorial writing back in my newspaper days. Cartoons change the world, not words.

Dave Roos wrote about Thomas Nast, the illustrator who went after Boss Tweed who ran the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine that ran New York in the latter half of the 19th Century. Roos said:

Nast produced more than 140 political cartoons targeting Boss Tweed, says Ryan Hyman, curator at the Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, which exhibits one of Nast’s most famous cartoons, “Tammany Tiger Loose—What are you going to do about it?” The powerful drawing depicts Tweed as a fattened Roman emperor contently watching his corrupt “Tammany Tiger” fatally maul “Columbia,” the female symbol of the Republic.

Nast drew inspiration for his cartoons from articles and editorials about Tweed’s brazen corruption published in the New-York Times, a new Republican newspaper. The more that the Times revealed, the angrier and bolder Nast’s drawings become. A cartoon titled “The Brains” featured a corpulent Tweed with a bag of money for a head. Another depicted all of New York under the giant thumb of Tweed.

The destructive potential of Nast’s cartoons wasn’t lost on Tweed.

“Let’s stop those damned pictures,” Tweed reportedly said. “I don’t care so much what the papers write about me—my constituents can’t read, but damn it, they can see pictures.”

His party’s constituents today can read but don’t.

Nast’s best of those 140 cartoons Tweed didn’t like was “Who Stole The People’s Money?”

’Twas Him.

The crayon is mightier than the sword. Anne DiFabio wrote:

Nast’s portrayal of Tweed as enormously bloated helped demonstrate the political leader’s corruption. His images captured public attention and helped incite public outrage. While he couldn’t force people to act or vote in a certain way, Nast influenced public opinion of Tweed and Tammany.

And the public responded. The 1871 election greatly weakened the Tweed Ring, with the public voting many Tammany candidates out of office, an event credited in part to Nast’s cartoons. While this had a huge impact on New York politics in general, it also pushed Nast to the forefront of his medium. He became the man who could topple political regimes.

Following the 1871 election, a host of fraud, forgery, and larceny charges were brought against Tweed and his allies. Many, including Tweed himself, were sent to prison. In 1875, however, Tweed escaped and set sail to Spain where he was eventually extradited after a Spanish officer recognized him from a Nast cartoon. Tweed was sent back to a New York jail, where he remained until his death in 1878.

This is why my advice to any newspaper with an editorial page is to get the best cartoon you can to make your case.

Well, my first advice is to not have an editorial page and not run an opinion pieces including sports columnists and Dear Abby because they throw shade on the objectivity of coverage of politics, baseball and relationships. But people in the newspaper business are mesmerized by their own opinions, so I may as well be talking to the wall.

Which leads to the idiot editors at Newsday in Long Island who were dumb enough to run Chip Bok’s—for lack of a better word—tribute to Charlie Kirk.

Now, I get what Bok may have been aiming at. Oops, wrong word. I get what he may have been trying to do. In the most favorable light, he may have been trying to show that lefties cannot make their case with facts and so they use bullets.

Bok is not a liberal. His cartoons show that.

But Bok failed Rule No. 1. Never show blood. Oh, you can show a bloody flag but Bok showed the blood coming out of Kirk’s neck. It was ugly and disrespectful of Charlie and his family, as well as every one of his supporters.

Bok failed to read the room. Lefties on the cable news channels have been ripping Charlie calling him racist, transphobic and the rest of deplorable words in Hillary’s basket. After being disgusted by those panelists, Newsday readers then opened their papers, saw the cartoon and were disgusted.

Only after being bashed online, did the editors apologize:

On Saturday, Newsday published a syndicated editorial cartoon referring to the assassination of Charlie Kirk that was insensitive and offensive.

We deeply regret the mistake and sincerely apologize to the family of Charlie Kirk and to all.

We made an error in judgement. The cartoon has been removed from our digital platforms. In his illustration, Chip Bok used the name of Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, and the theme of his Utah event—Prove Me Wrong—to suggest that Kirk’s assassination might be a turning point for healing our nation’s divide.

The imagery was inappropriate and should have never been published in Newsday.

Good.

Now Newsday should dump its editorial page because its editors are terrible at it. They lack empathy and they know even less about decency.

What Bok should have done was show Charlie Kirk as he lived, not as he died. It was a moment to show Willie Mays catching a fly ball in heaven.

Or better yet, have Gandhi tell Charlie, “The odd thing about assassins, Mister Kirk, is they think they killed you.”

As for Jimmy Kimmel, if Steven Colbert was losing $40 million a season with the top rated ABC-CBS-NBC late night show, how much money was Kimmel losing? Sounds like a good excuse to pull the plug on an unwatched and unwatchable show.

We live in a society where ghouls like Jimmy Kimmel celebrate the murder of someone whose opinions don’t match the left’s—unaware that the left changes its opinions on a whim. It took about 3 years to go from mocking the “It’s Ma’am” guy at GameSpot to outlawing the misgendering of trannies.

Kimmel can say what he wants, just not on ABC anymore.

Two polls today.