Cartoon and its context

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Do you find this funny? Muslim staffers at The Washington Post were said to have responded “emotionally” to the depiction of a woman dressed in traditional Muslim garb and espousing conservative Islamic views (Fox News, 2007). For full article, check out Fox News.

image source: Salon.com

The right, the wrong and the limits in cartoon publication in the media – the newspaper and the internet is a debatable issue.

The author of Cartoons and Their Contexts states in the article that cartoons are of mixed quality – whether good or bad, they often offend and provoke; the fine line separating it depends on individual readers, being only – of taste, law, convention, principle or judgment.

This can be further explained by Schriver’s (1997, p.364) theory which states that reading is a social act that depends on a community that shares meaning; yet it is also an individual act that depends critically on the reader’s unique knowledge, attitudes and values. This basically means that each set of cartoon strip published in the media – good or bad in quality, stands a chance of offending an individual or even a group of readers (be it the majority or minority) as it boils down to how the readers perceive the cartoon strips to be.

Readers would decode and comprehend comic strips through a constant interaction with the visuals and texts by ‘filling in the gaps’ with social or cultural knowledge of their own (Walsh 2006, p.25).

This could be further associated with the schema theory where readers interact with texts and construct their meaning by calling on their framework of prior knowledge and background experience of objects, situations, events and actions (Putnis and Petelin 1996, p. 303).

Essentially, what is considered to be offensive to one and not to another individual can be hard to define. Refaie (2003, p.81) states in the article, Understanding visual metaphor: the example of newspaper cartoons, that it is not always possible to determine unambiguously which ‘thoughts’ a particular depiction is intended to give rise to, let alone what will actually mean to individual readers. Meaning is never simply inherent in a visual text, but it is jointly negotiated by the producers and readers (Refaie 2003, p.81).

It is also in the interplay of texts and visuals that it may be able to express and complement and extend each other, or even clash and contradict (Kress and van Leeuwen 1998, p. 187). Basically, the script of the cartoon maybe not be offensive, but the visuals could be and it could also be the other way round.

Readers would relate the comic strips to their social and cultural context, and their schemata of experiences, expectations, emotions and attitudes.

Indeed that it is only fair that cartoon artists should be aware and sensitive towards cultural differences when producing cartoon strips. However, it also depends on the perception and subjectivity of the reader to decide as to whether the cartoons are offensive or humorous.

Despite the difficulties of defining what is considered to be offensive or otherwise, newspapers nowadays are equipped with publishing details of internet links (hyperlinks) to cartoons published in the newspapers and on their websites.

Thus, readers are entitled with a choice to decide individually to stand a chance of getting offended by reading the cartoon strip or to stay away completely.

Reference:

Evans CD 2007, Washington Post, Other Newspapers Won’t Run ‘Opus’ Cartoon Mocking Radical Islam, Fox News.com, viewed 30 October 2007, <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,294779,00.html>

Guardian Unlimited 2006, Cartoons and their context, The Guardian, viewed 30 October 2007, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoonprotests/story/0,,1703551,00.html>

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 1998, ‘Chapter 7: Front pages: (the critical) analysis of newspaper layout’, in Bell, A & Garret, P (eds) 1998, Approaches to media discourse, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 186-219.

Putnis, P & Petelin, R 1996, Professional Communication: Principles and Applications, Prentice Hall, Sydney.

Refaie, EE 2003, ‘Understanding visual metaphor: the example of newspaper cartoons’, Visual Communication, vol 2, no. 1, pp. 75-95.

Schriver, KA 1997, Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Texts for Readers, Wiley Computer Pub, New York.

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.