Thursday, June 16, 2022

Craphouse / 'new Gannett' slouches further toward Gomorrah

 It's not really Gannett, of course, except for branding purposes, and for MY anti-branding purposes, Gatehouse is Craphouse.

So, what HAS Craphouse done now that draws ire?

Decided to slash the editorial page at all its dailies. Well, the print version, at least, as Craphouse is basically looking more and more like Advance on a vulture capitalist budget. No matter how many days a week they print, a print version of an editorial page is Wednesday and Sunday only, and at one Craphouse paper, it's reportedly Sunday only.

Here's the bottom line:

One cartoonist, speaking on background about the decision, said “It’s a cowardly and wholly expected move. Even for those one or two days a week, I’ve been asked to draw ‘unifying’ rather than ‘divisive’ cartoons. In other words, they want Hallmark cards.”

So, in that sense, if Craphouse was essentially running lets-not-offend-MAGAts-too-much cartoons, other than dollars in their wallets, it's not a loss for the cartoonists. The loss for broader American discourse already happened.

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