CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Can We Still Laugh Together? Political Cartoons and Censorship

Photograph Source: Edward Ardizzone – Public Domain

“Journalism is an essential pillar of democracy,” observed Irene Khan, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression on May 3, World Press Freedom Day. According to Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, the United States has fallen to its lowest ranking on record in 2025 after a decade-long decline. What happens to satire when press freedom shrinks? Why has satire increasingly become something institutions fear rather than defend?

Major U.S. media institutions are scaling back or restricting editorial cartoons, from the New York Times ending its international cartoon syndication in 2019 to The Washington Post facing the 2025 resignation of Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes after her cartoon was not published.

Now the pressure on satire is moving beyond newsrooms into U.S. government policy. A March 9 Pentagon memo stated that Stars and Stripes, the soldiers’ newspaper, would no longer be permitted to publish “comic strips and editorial cartoons from commercial news media sources.” According to a January Pentagon plan announced by spokesperson Sean Parnell, the newspaper was to eliminate what he called “woke distractions that siphon morale.”

Bill Mauldin, Eisenhower and the Limits of Satire

The tension between satire and authority is not new. In The New York Review of Books, Bill McKibben traces this tension back to the cartoons of the legendary Bill Mauldin, who wrote for Stars and Stripesin World War II while serving active duty.

Mauldin’s cartoons, immensely popular with the troops, portrayed soldiers being simple, regular GI Joes, rather than the spit and polish image General George Patton wanted. Patton considered Mauldin an “unpatriotic anarchist,” and complained about him to his superior, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Eisenhower rejected Patton’s objections in a letter to a theater commander: “A great........

© CounterPunch