Artist: Aaron McGruder
Confronting Bodies: The Washington Post
Date of Action: November 2003
Specific Location: Washington, D.C.
Description of Artwork: Aaron McGruder is the creator and author of "The Boondocks," a comic strip that features several African American characters. The teenaged protagonist, Huey Freeman, frequently asserts his political views.
Description of Incident: In the strip in question, Huey and his friend Caesar suggest that U.S. National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, "needs some good ol' fashioned lovin'." The Washington Post suggested that since they could not verify whether Rice was involved in a relationship or not, they would not print the strip.
Results of Incident: The Washington Post discontinued "The Boondocks" for the week.
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/01/04/tem_tem1comic.html
'And for those outraged that the low-rated Doonesbury survived while Boondocks didn't, we made the decision to drop Boondocks because we did not want to keep publishing a comic that we regularly needed to censor. During the past year, Boondocks was substituted a number of times because it was deemed inappropriate for a family newspaper. And not just this family newspaper. Editors across the country were making the same decisions.
Our policy is that we publish a comic strip or we don't. Once we start pulling specific strips, as well as entire weeks' worth, it is time to drop that strip. Although Boondocks has its fans, many of you were uncomfortable with it, and at times we were, too. '
kudos to the Enquirer, Cincinnatti, dated 1/4/04
Frankly, Doonesbury is much farther left and more irritating to me. Can't stand Trudeau's daily commie diatribes and his stuff is anything but funny-hence why does it appear in the comics pages? Is that yet another of my pungent rhetorical questions that will never be answered by newspaper editors to whom I have posed the question?