The scandal over cartoonist Bill Day’s plagiarism, recycling of his own previous cartoons and self-plagiarism is a teachable moment: an opportunity for cartoonists to reassess basic standards, readers to see that editorial cartoonists police their own, and for editors and  publishers – not to mention prize committees – to begin to understand the difference between high-quality artists with integrity and cheating hacks. Unfortunately, the main news outlets that cover the world of editorial cartooning and journalism are falling down on the job, alternatingly muddying the waters with stories that imply that clarity is impossible in such situations, or – in at least one case – deliberately obfuscating and downright lying about the facts.

Many of us were looking forward to the coverage of the Washington Post’s Michael Cavna, who writes the Comics Riffs  blog for the paper in the  nation’s capital.  Unfortunately, Cavna buried the lede in a piece that put my friend and colleague Scott Stantis’ wondering aloud about a New York Post cover at the top of an article that should have emphasized Bill Day’s perfidy, and then gave an excessive amount of space to disassembling by Daryl Cagle, Day’s syndicator and champion in an attempt to raise $35,000 via Indiegogo in order to subsidize the below-standard low rates that Cagle pays to Day.

Over at Poynter, another leading trade industry source pretty much everyone in the field, Andrew Beaujon didn’t just fumble the ball – he threw it away:

“Unauthorized interpolation? Ham-fisted aggregation? Media-blogger-baiting transgression? Whatever it is, it seems like a lesser light to shine on Day’s work.”

What the hell? What can you call a cartoonist who finds a piece of artwork online, one that is clearly labeled with copyright and credited information, Photoshop’s the image while stripping out the credits and bylines, pastes it into his own work, adds a smidge of his own drawing, and then has the gall to sign the thing? He isn’t an unauthorized interpolator or a ham-fisted aggregatoe or a transgressor. He is a plagiarist, pure and simple. Well, maybe not so pure.

But by far the most shameful dereliction of duty is by the once widely-respected trade magazine Editor & Publisher.  For, for the days of David Astor, a gentlemanly scribe who steered the magazine through several decades as newspapers and the syndication business crumbled. Astor has been put out to farm, relegated to writing for a local newspaper in New Jersey, and his old spot is now occupied by Rob Tornoe, a cartoonist, blogger and – wait for this – employee of Daryl Cagle. Yes, that Daryl Cagle. The guy who syndicates Bill Day.

According to reliable sources, Rob is a de facto full-time employee of Cagle Cartoons. In an email to me he categorically denied this, but the argument appears to hang on semantics. In order to avoid paying full benefits, Cagle, like many other American employers, deems Rob to be an independent contractor. But the fact that he gets a 1099 instead of a W2 at tax time doesn’t change the fact that he derives a substantial amount of his income – probably most of it – from a person he covers in the media. Not only has he written about Cagle and his cartoonists, he wrote about the Bill Day fundraising campaign without informing his readers of his fiduciary relationship.

When the scandal broke 12 days ago, E&P suddenly went silent. Of course, no one should really wonder why. After all, according to those same sources,  Rob himself originally conceived of and personally loaded the Day fund-raising campaign up to the website of Indiegogo. They further allege that Rob continues to play a leading role in managing not only the campaign but the post-plagiarism scandal crisis response. For example, after I posted a comment about the scandal to the Indiegogo page Rob apparently mentioned to Cagle that it was possible to delete it. It has since vanished.

Now E&P – or more accurately Rob – is finally breaking his silence about the scandal in an article whose dishonesty is so over-the-top that you either have to laugh or give up on journalism as an honest profession. To start: “(Full disclosure: I am a Cagle.com contributor)”

Hilarious! “Contributor” implies that his cartoons or columns are distributed through Daryl’s syndicate. No, Rob. Rob actually works for them. Whether he works 40 or 20 or 10 hours a week, this is the sort of thing that every writer knows he or she is supposed to reveal. Readers deserve and want to know when there are conflicts of interest. Why E&P continues to employ Rob is baffling beyond belief. Sort of like Cagle himself. Why is he keeping an acknowledged plagiarist on the syndication list?

By the way: the anonymous blogger who maintains the That Cartoon Critic Tumblr blog continues to post new examples of plagiarism. Right now we are at number 56.

Rob’s piece is a masterpiece of obfuscation, smoke and mirrors: “Further clouding debate…others see it as simply an opportunity for time-constrained cartoonists to take a shortcut…even Walt Disney employed similar time-saving methods.” Newsflash: editorial cartooning is different. No editor who subscribes to a syndicated editorial cartoonist expects to get recycled rehashed crap. And if you’re going to send out recycled rehashed self-plagiarized crap, the least that you can do is label it as such.

Those of us who oppose plagiarism and hackwork aren’t even being allowed to comment in response to these sleazy articles. I tried to post the comment below, and was repeatedly blocked – either by a name block recognition program or because the comment section had simply been disabled by E&P:

Of the many lame excuses that have been given to justify cartoonist Bill Day’s brazen acts of plagiarism, recycling, and self-plagiarism – no, there is absolutely nothing unclear about any of this, not if you’re honest and/or willing to pay attention – this one is one of the more nauseating: “…in a perfect world, editorial cartoonists would produce original and excellent new cartoons on a daily basis. But clearly, with cutbacks and layoffs adversely affecting the ranks of political cartoonists, such a perfect world doesn’t exist.”

The recession that has devastated the American economy and impacted journalism and print media exceptionally hard is no excuse to cut corners on basic journalistic ethics and integrity. If you don’t have the time or energy to produce high-quality original work, auction off your drafting table on eBay and go away.

Bill Day is a newcomer to the world that I and many other younger editorial cartoonists – I use the term loosely, since I will turn 50 later this year – been living in for decades. Bill Day has held numerous staff jobs, neither I nor any of the young generation of cartoonists ever have or likely ever will. He has won prizes that no member of the young generation ever has. In other words, he has had every advantage, yet he has squandered the accidental benefits of demographics – to be a baby boomer was to be able to walk into almost any newspaper and score a job – and wallowed in a cesspool of repeated ethical lapses.

I am broke. I don’t have a staff job. Never have. I might lose my house. But you won’t catch me plagiarizing, repurposing or self-plagiarizing my work. I do the best that I can with the talent that I have and let the chips fall where they may, as do many other hard-working impoverished cartoonists. We don’t ask for much, but it is disgusting to watch excuses be made for and prizes awarded to people who betray the basic standards that are universally accepted within our craft.

 

Even though it feels a lot like spitting in the wind to try to save a profession that doesn’t really seem to want to save itself, I will continue to do so because I love editorial cartooning and American journalism and I know that there are readers and cartoonists and others who care. This stuff matters.

I have posted this to the comment section of the build day fundraising campaign on Indiegogo:

As an early contributor – cartoonists need to stick together – I am disgusted that Bill has accrued nearly $38,000 as he was being unmasked as a serial plagiarist.

Far from being one of the best of the best, it turns out that he is one of the worst of the worst. He should never draw again. I want my $100 back. Everyone else here should demand the same.

Details: http://dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2013/01/15/plagiarism-allegations-hit-bill-day-in-closing-days-of-fundraising-campaign/

This time I am auctioning off the original artwork for my next three cartoons. The auction runs a full week, and don’t forget, this is an opportunity to support an actual real living artist while he is still actually really living. So bid now and bid generously.

Every now and then, I auction off my original cartoons. Original cartoon art is actually an extremely affordable way to both support a cartoonist and to invest in artwork that can increase in value substantially faster than many other forms of art. Of course, the opposite is also true.

But the really cool part is the chance to simply put it up on your wall. I have original cartoon art by a lot of my colleagues and by other cartoonists, and I love looking at it.  Among the artists by whom I have originals are Stan Mack, Carol Lay, Joel Pett, Jack Ohman, Matt Bors, Stephanie McMillan, Thomas Nast, Charles Schulz, Scott Adams, Jim Davis, Bil Keane, Jen Sorensen, Tom Tomorrow, and many others.

It is so cool to see the methodology, the mistakes, the corrections, etc. that go into an artist’s work. Anyway, someone who bought two of my originals recently sent me a photo of what they look like hanging on his wall in a frame, and I thought you might find it of interest.

By the way, here is this week’s auction.

Every now and then there is a reaction to a movie or other pop cultural phenomenon that makes me wonder whether everyone else saw a different version than I did, or whether I am insane, or whether I live in a society that is suffering from a case of mass delusion.

Everyone loves Kathryn Bigelow’s film “Zero Dark Thirty.” Great filmmaking, people say. Riveting. Important. One of the best films of the year. The movie has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including best screenplay.

There have been a few rumblings, namely by left-wing actors like Martin Sheen and Ed Asner, and by three senators including John McCain, that the film falsely and wrongfully implies that torture – or if you prefer the Orwellian term “enhanced interrogation techniques” – not only works, but specifically worked to extract the information that ultimately led to the raid on Pakistan in 2011. For those who were paying attention, i.e. those who read the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets, it is common knowledge that the CIA never obtained any useful intelligence by waterboarding and otherwise abusing Muslim detainees. Mostly, however, the word on the street is that the movie makes torture look disgusting and that it doesn’t make any such implication. Bigelow has already denied in an article in the Los Angeles Times that her film endorses torture tacitly or otherwise.

Just saw the film. It isn’t very good.

First and foremost, a movie should be entertaining. At least three times during the two hour 40 minute running time, I checked my watch. The lead actress was so bad – she has been nominated as best actress – that I don’t feel she deserves any publicity whatsoever, not even the extremely minimal mention in this blog. Even the amazing James Gandolfini delivered a phone-it-in performance, his accent veering wildly between vague Southern white CIA boss and central New Jersey.

Not only was Bigelow apparently incapable of extracting strong performances from her cast, she apparently skipped a lot of moviemaking 101. There are countless scenes where you can see exactly what is coming. For example, when a female CIA operative waives basic security protocols at a forward operating base in Afghanistan in order to meet an Afghan she has been led to believe is an Al Qaeda mole, the camera keeps coming back to her increasingly silly and absurdly pleased face, as though she were waiting on a boyfriend instead of a jihadi in the middle of nowhere. You know she is going to get blown up. You know the dude is fake. He has to be. The only way to set up the scene in such a way for tension or surprise would be for nothing bad to happen. In another scene, the lead actress – an absurd asexual amalgamation because, you know, in Hollywood, you just have to have one character do everything – is asked to sit in the back of the room even though she did all of the hard work that led to finding Osama bin Laden’s lair. When the big boss shows up, you know she’s not going to be able to shut up, and of course she can’t. She has to pipe up and say something super macho, and you know that instead of just getting fired for disrespecting the boss, they’re going to find it amusing. Because that’s the way this sort of scene goes.

Most galling to me is the way Bigelow disrespects the history of an event that was well-documented and very recent. Don’t tell me this doesn’t matter. She is selling this as history. That’s why the very first scene of the movie informs us that this is based on true events.

First and foremost, we open with an audio montage of 911 calls from victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Everything that follows, therefore, is supposedly related to avenging 9/11. This movie was originally intended to be released before the November 2012 elections, and many Republicans accused Bigelow and the studio of trying to release a Democratic Party propaganda film to increase President Obama’s chances of reelection. Sounded silly at the time, but once you see it, it’s pretty clear that they were right. Everything here is done to make the president look great. We see him speaking one time, in the background, without comment, talking about how torture will no longer be condoned under his administration. No eye rolling, no hilarious comments about how they still do it. There’s another reference to him, in which a top CIA executive informs our fearless starlet that the president is a prudent and brilliant man and won’t execute any plan that is less than watertight.

There sure is a lot of torture. And it is mostly whitewashed. We know for a fact that detainees in CIA black sites were kept naked for days and weeks and months at a time, but that is not shown here. It’s brutal, to be sure, but not as brutal as it really was. Like the entire movie, the tone of the torture is flat. We just don’t really care. During the great dénouement in Osama bin Laden’s compound, the Seal six team that raided it are portrayed as professional, methodical and calm. The women and children are herded aside, even told to calm down in a quiet voice as their husbands and relatives are massacred. You know that that is not possibly how it was. These guys were trained, ruthless assassins. These women and children were pushed around and brutalized. Physically as well. They had to have been. They were in the way. It is so telling that Bigelow gets the sounds of the Third World right, dogs barking in the background all night long, yet tamps down the sobs and screams of the boys and girls whose parents are lying in a pool of blood.

So much of this is ahistorical. Bigelow depicts the machine gun attack against the Doha Towers complex, the bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad, and the bombing of a bus in London as events that were directly ordered by Osama bin Laden, when we know for a fact that that could not have been the case. By 2011, bin Laden was trying to keep abreast of events while keeping low. He was not directing them.

Unlike many other filmgoers, I was very skeptical of “The Hurt Locker.” I thought the tone was flat, the narrative was slow, the soundtrack manipulative. I really hated the fact that we never got to see anything from the standpoint of the Iraqis, only the military, and that the military that we saw was endlessly professional, competent and caring about the lives of the locals – something that we know simply wasn’t true. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, typical attitudes of US soldiers ranged from indifference to having fun slaughtering the locals. In some cases – not rare ones – troops drove around and just shot at people walking down the street. This wasn’t everybody, obviously, but it deserved to be documented in some way.

ZDT is yet another love letter to the US military. Once again, we never get to know anything about the locals. Bin Laden never gets a word in edge wise. Neither do many Afghans or Pakistanis. What is the motivation of radical Islam? We never find out. Yes, we see some of them as torturers, but they are torturers with a soul. They are regretful, they get a little bit sick. As for whether or not torture works, well, this movie is crystal clear – nothing else is shown that does work. First torture. Then a break. Then bin Laden gets killed. There are never any ethical quandaries. No doubts. What is this movie about? It’s about a stubborn woman who persists against bureaucratic indifference until, somehow, a brilliant president we never get to see has the insight and wisdom to greenlight her project. One has to wonder, is this about Bigelow herself?

Then there is the biggest whitewash of all, about exactly how bin Laden died. We know from the assassins – the special forces soldiers who were there – that bin Laden was taken alive. He was probably shot in the initial melee, but by most credible accounts was still breathing and in fact standing up in US custody, possibly wearing cuffs, for several minutes. Washington was informed. Then the order was given, possibly by the president himself but certainly by a top official, to execute him. This was a mob hit. That, not respect for Muslim sensibilities, is the best explanation for the fact that a photo of the course was never released.

Not much glory in any of this. To the contrary, even from a political point of view, the president missed a big opportunity by not taking the high road, dragging bin Laden back to New York to face trial. A fair trial. Represented by competent counsel. It would have sent a real message to the world. But that’s not the kind of political leadership we have. These guys are goons.

Hoo-rah. The only take away here is that the United States has Osama bin Laden’s scalp. Somehow this is supposed to make us feel good.

It’s just a movie, people will say, but that really isn’t true. In an era when very few people pay attention to the news or have a single clue about what is going on in any way about anything, popular movies often become the version of history that matters. For example, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan play fast and loose with history, and their version is the one that is widely accepted, even by journalists, today.

It’s not really a big deal that this movie sucks. But it is really weird that not everyone can see it.

I’ll never get a Pulitzer. It’s been 12 years—I’ll probably never win another major award. But I did get called an Ethics Hero by a very cool blog. Which really makes my weekend—and it just began. Awesome and thanks!

Ted Rall: The following is a new blog post by my friend, the cartoonist Matt Bors. Truth be told – and the truth has been suppressed for years – editorial cartooning in the United States has been swimming in a rank cesspool of corruption for decades. Starting in the 1960s, when the brilliant Chicago Tribune  cartoonist Jeff MacNelly came to prominence and was quickly and slavishly mimicked in tone and art style by scores of wannabes, continuing in the 1970s and 1980s when gag cartoons making fun of politicians without making any kind of political point replaced serious commentary, into the 1990s and 2000’s when my new, hard-hitting generation of alternative editorial cartoonists made a mark in the alternative newsweeklies but couldn’t revolutionize the profession because we were locked by the McNelly clones, and incestuous art form turned moribund, ossified and corrupt. In my view, copying another artist’s style is a terrible form of plagiarism. So is self-plagiarism: the practice of cutting and pasting an old cartoon and changing a couple of details to create a “new” cartoon. But some of these guys are so lame and untalented that they have actually resorted to a form of plagiarism nobody can possibly call anything other than vile: Photoshopping and or light-tabling another artist’s work. Please read Matt’s post and click on the links to the cartoons to understand the gravity of this situation. Then consider the fact that the cartoonists involved have won many of the top prizes in the field, collected millions of dollars in salaries, and held some of the most prestigious jobs in American newspaperdom – opportunities that have been denied to people like Matt Bors and myself.

Crime pays. Who would you rather be – a famous guy who gets disgraced, or someone who never gets to be famous in the first place?

Why Does Plagiarism in Editorial Cartooning Persist?

by Matt Bors

Editorial cartoonist Bill Day hit his fundraising goal on the crowd funding site Indiegogo this week: $35,000 to keep drawing editorial cartoons for a year. Day is syndicated through Cagle and, like the rest of us, can’t make a full time living with the rates we are paid. Since he lost his staff position a few years ago, Day has been drawing cartoons part time while working odd jobs and Daryl Cagle launched this campaign in order to keep him drawing. Problem is, Day doesn’t do as much drawing as he used to.

Earlier this week Daily Cartoonist posted a recent cartoon where Day pulled an image of a gun created by Zack Fowler and used it without permission. Once caught, he swapped the cartoon out with a version he drew, but you can see from the comments on the post that neither Fowler nor the papers who pay to run Day’s work knew about this until Alan Gardner’s post. Day hasn’t even bothered to issue a response to Gardner, his silence being almost more damning than the evidence in front of our face.

Then there is the anonymously written Tumblr account, That Cartoon Critic, which shows repeated instances of Day re-using his cartoons to such an extent that it’s jaw-dropping. Creating new work every day, week in and week out, is difficult, but not plagiarizing others or constantly reissuing old cartoons is not. It’s time for cartoonists and syndicates to stop aiding this.

To be clear, I’m not talking about people who may have drawn similar jokes and had an overlap of ideas with another cartoonist. We’re talking plagiarism, using another person’s art without permission, and literally tracing another cartoonist’s work. We’re also talking about reissuing your own work constantly while presenting it as something new. It’s happened enough now to constitute not an anomaly, but an actual thing that’s wrong with the field. Is it wrong to “self-plagiarize”? Most certainly. Let’s hear what Bill Day has to say about it:

 Plagiarism, the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own, and its ancillary self-plagiarism, in which individuals republish work that they have already published, represent significant challenges to scientific journals. Authors have a right to be acknowledged as the source of their own work, and new authors must present their work in their own words.

 That’s not our Bill Day, the cartoonist, rather Bill Day the editor of Biosystems Engineering speaking about a plagiarism controversy in scientific journals. Perhaps the cartoonist Bill Day can allow himself to absorb some of the other Bill Day’s wisdom.

Cartoonists are sometimes loathe to publicize anything that shines a negative light on our dwindling field. But if we want negative stories to stop, we have to stop supporting people we know are doing terribly unethical work. The fault resides first and foremost with the artist, but syndicates and editors who hold up this kind of work are also to blame. There’s no reason Daryl Cagle should be putting forth Bill Day as a cartoonist to “save” with internet donations when he can’t meet a minimum level of professionalism. I’ll even say this about my own syndicate, Universal Uclick, who continues to syndicate Jeff Stahler’s work after he lost his job for plagiarizing recently after multiple instances dogged him for years. They should stop.

During my years criticizing lazy and unethical cartooning habits, I compiled a number of examples that, for whatever reason, other cartoonists weren’t willing to publish or even forward in an email. They would send them to me and I tried unsuccessfully for over a year to get someone more prominent than myself to publish them, as I have lots of other things to attend to than being the poster boy for speaking out about these kind of lapses. But many of my peers won’t so much as link to a plagiarism story when it’s published, content to merely complain privately over beers about people who in some cases survived their entire careers while blatantly swiping the work of others. The result is that many cartoonists haven’t even had to so much as publicly explain why their cartoons look so awfully similar to something else, and many editors are unaware it even happens.

I made a decision yesterday to publish these myself on Twitter because to hold on to them any longer would feel like I’m actively covering for some of these guys. I discovered none of these myself, having received them all from other cartoonists and editors, sometimes anonymously. You can decide for yourself what you think. But here they are. I’m done hanging on to them.

Here is another example of Jeff Stahler straight up tracing and flipping a Mike Lester drawing. It was never published around the time of his most recent plagiarism scandal and was sent to me by an anonymous syndicate editor fed up with seeing his rampant stealing.

Here is another example of Bill Schorr swiping from MacNelly closely enough that it appears traced.

Finally, here is Pulitzer Prize winner Jim Borgman with some cartoons that look so similar to MacNelly’s that they are clearly swiped. Why swipe when you can draw well on your own? No clue. I’m told he was confronted by some cartoonists regarding the similarity and even came up with an excuse – but not publicly of course. Nothing has been written about it until now and I don’t think his editors were even made aware of the charges.

 

Again, I post these because I can’t hang on to them any longer without feeling dirty. Too much of this debate takes place behind a giant wall hidden from editors and the public. Talking about all this in the open? That’s an idea more cartoonists should copy.

(C) 2013 Matt Bors, All Rights Reserved, Reposted with Permission.

 

Ted Rall: Cartooning is like, or should be like, a guild. We are all dependent on the reputation not only of our own individual brands, but also of the field as a whole. Editors currently have a dim view of cartoonists, and this sort of hack work is part of the reason. That takes money out of our pockets. If you are a cartoonist, please consider posting about this to your own blog. You don’t have to necessarily come out in favor of or against Bill Day or any other cartoonist. Just mention it. This is a rare opportunity for our field to examine itself and begin a conversation and a discussion that should have started years ago. The worst thing that could possibly happen would be for this story to go away.