Tough Luck, NYPost.com… & Revisiting “Bush or Chimp”
Are advertisers and readers online and off zooming away from The New York Post and www.nypost.com because of the kerfluffle over an editorial cartoon that stupidly (in so many ways) compared President Obama to a chimpanzee?
Certainly, that’s the worry: after the Reverend Al Sharpton — smelling blood and never able to stop swimming — organized an opportunistic protest rally, the Post and Post-owner Rupert Murdoch himself each apologized, with the News Corp chairman having to descend from whichever castle he was hanging his hat to apply a torniquet to the hemorrhaging mess of public outcry.
But I’ll bet that Murdoch would have stood his ground if the newspaper business wasn’t at the front of the poisoned Kool-Aid line. So it was a good, if somewhat hysterical, move.
But if Michael Woolf’s Newser blog’s guess is true that News Corp is about to depose longtime loyalist editor Col Allan over this, then Murdoch is making a mistake. Allan should remain in place, lesson learned and properly chastened, as should the Post’s advertisers who are getting what they paid for in this mess. (I know that it prompted ME to click over to NYPost.com for the first time in years.)
Don’t get me wrong, here: I’m no fan of the Post unless I’m lining the bottom of the bird cage. And I am a fan of our newly elected President.
But he’s the PRESIDENT, folks. President Obama is a big boy. The gloves come off when somebody gets elected to this office, and this was an editorial CARTOON.
The president himself, gracefully, has been silent on this issue because he knows he has bigger fish to fry.
Yes, the cartoon was stupid, tone-deaf and tasteless, and yes making any racist allusion when we’ve just elected a biracial president is idiotic, but demanding Allan’s head on a platter isn’t good for journalism, for the country, for a departure from the overly-partisan last eight years, and suggests that Reverend Sharpton has too much time on his hands and didn’t get a post in the administration for a good reason.
Final Note: there weren’t any rallies when www.bushorchimp.com launched in 2000, shortly after the last president was elected and going on to get more than five million hits between then and March, 2003. Yeah, George W. Bush is a white guy, but don’t absurd and highly personal comparisons come with the White House? Do a search on “clinton chimp” and you’ll get results (although, unsurprisingly as racism and sexism go hand in hand, mostly results for the Secretary of State).
The late President Ronald Reagan only WORKED with a chimp.
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