Or, being from the area, and having lived in that town for a decade and gone to university there, my response would be: local readers are very likely to be racists themselves.Twitter erupted in fury after the Tribune ran a syndicated Gary McCoy cartoon based on the looting and riots that gripped Ferguson after the shooting death of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. In the cartoon, Ferguson burns in the background as three black protesters hold picket signs advocating looting, and one black man steals a television set.
"I understand for many people, there is a very thin line between provocative and disturbing and racist," Robertson tells Daily RFT. "Maybe we were a little tone deaf on that. And maybe that's an understatement."
[...]
Robertson isn't the one who chose the cartoon, but he gave final approval for it to run in Wednesday's paper. He's surprised at the influx of overwhelmingly negative reaction, though 98 percent of it comes through Twitter, he says, not from regular readers in this college town two hours west of St. Louis.
[...]
"Even though I don't necessarily agree that it had no value, it's not worth the trouble it has caused," he says. "There is no journalistic principle involved here. You'd rather not piss people off."
[...]
"In the context of their hometown paper, I think [local readers] know better than that we would run a racist cartoon," Robertson says.
River Front Times (St. Louis)
The cartoonist in question, Gary McCoy [not a Columbia local], is not only a racist, he's an asshole and an imbecile. (And possibly, "an unprincipled whore.") As you will see for yourself at the end of this post.
I first came across the racist Ferguson cartoon through the Twitter account of a Missouri professor, Sam Cohen. It got a lot of publicity (not necessarily from Cohen), and Billmon has been having a Twitter conversation with a defender of McCoy's work (also here):
Professor Cohen has gotten some play from the cartoonist himself:
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