Cartoons Don’t Kill People. . .

                Humorless religious fanatics kill people.

                As we’ve seen too many times over the past few years, cartoons can inflame passions.

                It has ever been so. It is said Thomas Nast moved out of New York City to Morristown to get away from Boss Tweed and his minions. Whether that’s true or whether he, like many other rich people, just wanted to escape summer in pre-air-conditioning New York, it remains true that Tweed said, “I’m not worried about editorials because I know my constituents can’t read, but they sure do look at the cartoons.”

                Regardless of what brought Nast to the cooler suburbs, he survived there, in a rambling Colonial house that still stands on a tree-lined street two blocks from the old Alfred Vail mansion.

                In recent years, cartoonists have not been so lucky. In 2006, Muslim outrage resulted in arrests in Norway for an alleged terrorist plot against a Danish newspaper. The anger was directed against cartoons perceived to be anti-Muslim.

                And then there was Paris.

                The invasion and murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo rocked the world of journalism as it rocked the world at large.

                Journalists have never been unrealistic about the occasional dangers of the job. From Robert Capa on a Vietnamese beach to James Foley in a Middle Eastern desert they know the  perils of the  “disputed barricades” written about by Alan Seeger during World War I.

                But France was not a battlefield. Or it was not supposed to be.

                It became a battlefield.

                It was Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Inquirer who made the statement about cartoons not killing people. She is one of the few remaining staff cartoonists on a major American daily and the only woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for cartooning.

                She was on a panel sponsored by the Deadline Club, the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

                A number of SPJ chapters held ethics events since the organization introduced a revised code of ethics last September.  Charlie Hebdo intensified the discussion.

                And by discussion, I mean, often, debate. Journalists tend to be like Episcopalians in that they are never short of things they disagree on.  And the talk may get heated. And there is often whiskey.

                The big discussion at the time of the Paris massacre was whether to reproduce the cartoons. The arguments on both sides seemed as valid as they were intense.

                At the Deadline Club discussion, Gail Gove, legal counsel for Reuters, explained she asks the question, “who could die” when faced with a decision to run a controversial cartoon or photo or story.

                “Are our people safe” is Reuters’ bottom line, she said. “We have to think about the consequences. Sometimes the most heroic thing you can do is not publish.”

                She also noted it can be a disservice to the readers if Reuters’ correspondents are expelled from a country for something published.

                Part of the reason cartoons incite so much passion is they are in-your-face.

                “You can’t paraphrase poetry,” Victor Navasky, former editor of The Nation, commented to the deadline club, adding, “that’s even more true of cartoons.”

                And, of course, it is. Cartoons strike you as funny, or not. Offensive, or not. But, they are what they are. And the good ones are memorable.

                Which is to say cartoonists have the same responsibility other journalists have.

                Garry Trudeau says you always punch up at authority. Just another way of saying what Finley Peter Dunne told us:  “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

                So did the Deadline Club’s panel answer any questions? Not really. It did continue the discussion, the debate. Which is probably all we could have expected.