Controversial Cartoon Publishing: Danish cartoons and The New York Post

Cartoon publishing has existed since a long time ago. It was later revolutionalised by comic book artists such as Bob Kane and in Malaysia, the most well-known cartoon publisher is Datuk Mohammad Nor Khalid. The purpose of cartoon publishing back then functions like a modern newspaper in which to inform the people about a particular thing. Then, it was used for leisure and entertainment purposes. The social communication and the social discourse can be set in the form or humour or joke, which under the category of cartoon (Giarelli & Tulman, 2003)

With well-known cartoon publishing such as comic books and mangas, it is known for providing people some laughs and entertainment purposes. However, there was controversy surrounding a particular cartoon publishing company after it published an image of Prophet Muhammad. It was a worldwide outburst as there was sort of a war between the East and the West in which the East claimed it is the freedom of speech whereas the West argued that it is disgracing the religion (Hussain, 2007) A Danish cartoon publishing company published two form of Prophet Muhammad which infuriated the Muslim community (Hussain, 2007). One of the cartoons that illustrated Prophet Muhammad portrays that He had a messy moustache and beard, seemingly half-dressed, wearing a sheathed sword around his waist, along with an outer vest over one of the shoulders (Hussain, 2007).

The other is regarding a cartoon published by The New York Times in which there were two policemen standing over a corpse of an ape in which some American critics claimed the ape is a cross-reference to Barack Obama (Hines, 2009). After the cartoon was published in the newspaper, numerous civil rights leaders and politicians were furious and quickly demanded a sincere apology from The New York Times publication company and Rupert Murdoch (Hines, 2010). In actual fact, the executives wanted to ‘borrow’ the ape as a cross-reference to Al Sharpton, who the executives view Al Sharpton as a public opportunist (Hines, 2009). Due to this incident, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and the chief executive of News Corporation wrote an apologetic article to apologize for the controversial carton that was published (Hines, 2009).

                    

                               Source: (sanfranciscosentinel.com, 2009)

Cartoon publishing according to Giarelli and Tulman (2003) have claimed the truth and to some extent try to represent reality, however, there are several controversies surround the use of cartoon publishing and therefore one has to be rational and ethical while publishing.

Reference

Giarelli, E & Tulman, L 2003, ‘Methodological issues in the use of published cartoons as data’, Qualitative Health Research, vol. 13, no. 7, pp. 945-956.

Hines, N 2009, Rupert Murdoch apologizes for controversial chimpanzee cartoon, Times Online, viewed 8 November 2010, <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5797869.ece>.

Hussain, AJ 2007, ‘The media’s role in a clash of misconceptions: the case of the Danish Muhammad cartoons’, The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 112-130.