What will you see?
Perhaps you noticed?
C-Span operator swept their cameras about the U.S. House chamber on Friday during the vote to reelect Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as Speaker. A huddle of white Republican men gathered here. A diverse cluster of Democractic women gathered for a selfie there. The cameras opened up the proceding, untethered from their normally fixed gaze. This is typical during a State of the Union Address but not House business as usual.
Heather Cox Richardson took note in her Letters from an American substack:
Today a new Congress, the 119th, came into session. As Annie Karni of the New York Times noted, Americans had a rare view into the floor action of the House because the party in control sets the rules for what parts of the House floor viewers can see. Without a speaker, there is no party in charge to set the rules, so the C-SPAN cameras recording the day could move as their operators wished.
They did. Limiting what the public can can see of the House chamber will return soon enough. Limiting what you can see is already happening elsewhere.
Over at The Washington Post, editors were deciding what their subscribers would see. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes announced her resignation after the opinions page rejected a cartoon depicting Post owner Jeff Bezos genuflecting with a sack of money before a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump. She’d worked at The Post for 16 years.
Telnaes writes on her substack:
I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.
The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.
Figures in the sketch represent Meta founder, Mark Zuckerberg; Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of The Los Angeles Times; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI; Mickey Mouse, the official spokesmouse of the Walt Disney Company; and Jeff Bezos, The Post’s owner.
David Shipley, The Post’s opinions editor, told reporters he disagreed with her interpretation of events (The New York Times):
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Mr. Shipley said in the statement. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”
Owners of press outlets “are responsible for safeguarding that free press— and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” Telnaes counters:
While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.
Efforts are already afoot by Trump and MAGA Republicans to rewrite recent history the way Sourtherners spread the Lost Cause myth. The proliferation of disinformation via social media and gimlet-eyed lying into cameras by “Christians” like Johnson further threaten to dissolve external reality under Americans’ feet until “Democracy dies in darkness.”
Men like those Telnaes depicts are lining up to be accessories.