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.

I have posted this to the comments section of the Bill 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/

If you’re in the market for movie posters, please check out my sponsored link here. They advertise here, which means they support my work, which means you’re helping me out.

The cartoon plagiarism scandal is spreading. I have just come into some blockbuster new information that could bring down at least one very important name in the world of cartooning. I am currently doing some research and should have something in the next 24 or 48 hours to report. I will post the results at my blog.

In addition it seems likely that there will be major press coverage breaking at any moment.

Although I am sad to see some of my colleagues suffer and it hurts to see the profession dragged through the mud like this, this is long overdue. Readers, editors and hard-working cartoonists deserve a lot better than the corrupt arrangements that have soiled and sullied a noble artform.

Editorial cartooning, an artform that was invented in caves but perfected by Americans in the 20th and 21st centuries, is in crisis. There is lots of blame to go around: the declining economic fortunes of print media as it failed to adapt to digitalization, terrible editors and publishers who elevated the worst work over the best work, prize committees that did the same thing, and – this pains me to say – an old boys network of cartoonists who refused to state, much less enforce, the same basic journalistic ethics that writers and college students everywhere must adhere to.

Now cartoonist Bill Day is at the center of an emerging plagiarism scandal. (Disclosure: I publicly criticized Day’s work in a letter to the editor of Editor & Publisher magazine during the 1990s, after he won the prestigious Fischetti Award for a cartoon that, to me, seemed like rank hackery.)  This will not come as a surprise within the profession. Rumors that Day was a plagiarist have been around pretty much forever. He was especially criticized, over beers, quietly, over what I call the practice of “self plagiarism” – repeatedly repurposing the same image over and over and over. Despite a Tumblr blog devoted to Day’s shenanigans, nothing was ever done about it.

It gets worse.

Day is syndicated by Cagle Cartoons, a one-man operation run by cartoonist Daryl Cagle, a powerhouse within the syndication world who has earned millions of dollars by monetizing and aggregating his colleagues’ work since the 1990s.  When this latest kerfuffle broke, Day was accused of Photoshopping copyrighted artwork from the website Deviant Art without credit or permission.  Daryl apparently took down the offending Bill Day cartoon and asked him to replace it with one that was hand drawn. Pretty sleazy. Having worked as a syndicate executive myself, and having been in the position of having to fire a cartoonist for plagiarism, I know what he should have done instead. He should have fired Bill. But that would’ve been very difficult. Why? As it happens, Cagle recently organized an Indiegogo fundraising campaign for Bill that has raised over $33,000 – the purpose is ostensibly to save the cartoonist, his career and prevent the indignity of him losing his home to foreclosure, but it’s hard to avoid the zero sum game aspect of the story as well: this works as a form of subsidy for a syndicate that underpays its cartoonists. (Disclosure number two: $100 of that is mine. And I want it back. I still think it’s important for cartoonists to support each other, especially when they are in financial trouble, but plagiarists aren’t cartoonists. They are thieves.)

To be fair, Bill Day is not alone. Other cartoonists have been caught plagiarizing. Jeff Stahler of the Columbus Dispatch was a serial plagiarist – I would imagine he probably still is – and although he lost his staff job at a newspaper that wouldn’t give my own work a second look, even though I am an Ohio boy, his syndicate, which also happens to be my syndicate, continues to distribute his work. David Simpson seems to have made quite a career of jumping from one newspaper to another after being fired for plagiarism.

It gets worse than that.

One of America’s most successful and most prominent cartoonists, Jim Borgman, who has won the Pulitzer Prize and virtually every other major award granted to journalists or cartoonists, was forced to admit that he plagiarized, literally lightboxing an image he wanted to appropriate. (Unfortunately,  I was ethically and honorbound not to reveal his name. This is because this revelation occurred in an exclusive, secret online forum for editorial cartoonists in which all participants agree not to share anything that is discussed. As of today, however, Matt Bors has outted Borgman via Twitter.)

Bill Schorr, hired by the New York Daily News over yours truly, was also a plagiarist. Serial.

Obviously there are not a lot of negative inducements for the ethically deprived in American editorial cartooning. To the contrary,  plagiarists and self-plagiarists tend to do quite well, collecting more awards, bigger incomes and getting hired for more prestigious jobs than those of us who think it is our job to come up with something original,  thought-provoking and possibly even controversial every day.

I was President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists between 2008 and 2009, after the organization had been around for half a century.  I accomplished a lot, not least saving the organization from going under completely during the 2008 fiscal meltdown. But my proudest achievement was to push through the first ever ethical component to the associations bylaws: a rule that allows the Board of Directors to expel any cartoonist they deemed guilty of plagiarism. Unfortunately, subsequent Boards of Directors have been namby-pamby and weak-willed about something that ought to be pretty straightforward, so much so that in 2011 they publicly declared that they were kind of sort of considering ethical guidelines. They didn’t mention the fact that they already had a very important one that they were empowered to use as they saw fit.

At this writing, there is not only no consensus within the field that plagiarism should be a fatal offense, one that ends your career as an editorial cartoonist forever, but widespread agreement that self-plagiarism  – the kind of thing that Bill Day did in the Tumblr blog – is fine. One cartoonist, who has won the Pulitzer Prize twice and holds a tasty sinecure at a national newspaper, is so famous for repurposing thing the same cartoons – in this case, he usually redraws them rather than cutting and pasting them in Photoshop, but the effect is exactly the same – that we have learned to predict the sort of events that will prompt his reuse of the same old metaphoric images.

Daryl Cagle, the cartoonist/syndicator, even bragged about it in his blog: “It amuses me to reuse old cartoons; I don’t find much opportunity to do it, but when I do, I chuckle to myself and take an extra hour for lunch.”

It isn’t as though some of us haven’t been trying to draw attention to these terrible practices. Every time the leading journalists who cover newspaper syndication and editorial cartooning have been contacted in the past about plagiarism and self-plagiarism, however, there has been little to no interest whatsoever in covering the story. Some of the excuses have absolutely been laughable, like the idea that they were cartoons that had been stolen years earlier, and therefore the story was no longer relevant, or that there is absolutely nothing wrong with self plagiarism because no one really expects original content anymore.

It’s hard to know who to hate more: the cartoonists who put out this kind of hackwork, the old boys network of their colleagues who think it’s perfectly fine, or the editors who hire them and the prize committees who rewards them at the expense of people who do original work. It’s a lot like the Lance Armstrong scandal:  if you’re a cycler who doesn’t cheat, you really hate losing to people who do. Right now, there are brilliant editorial cartoonists who are repeatedly being passed over for jobs. Most of them are “alternative editorial cartoonists” like me, Stephanie McMillan, Jen Sorensen, Matt Bors, Tom Tomorrow, Ruben Bolling, and don’t get me started about great cartoonists like Lloyd Dangle who literally were driven out of the profession because they couldn’t make enough money.  Bill Day, for example, worked at the Memphis Commercial Appeal from 1998 to 2009.  He got a salary, full benefits, probably even healthcare. But the same paper never would have considered someone like me or Tom Tomorrow.  Hell, they wouldn’t even run us in syndication. And the thing is, these plagiarists and self-plagiarists don’t steal good work or create good stolen product. Most of them are B-listers and C-listers, crummy hacks  who didn’t deserve to work even if they had been creating original stuff.

Fortunately, there is hope in the form of some editors. One editor responded to the Bill Day story  with comments that probably won’t surprise most readers but would come as a shock to the numerous American editorial cartoonists who really don’t think that plagiarism or self-plagiarism is a big deal: “As an editor who subscribes to Mr. Day’s syndicated work, we had always assumed that we were paying for new content. However, it appears that not only does Mr. Day steal the work of others, but has made a career out of using the same cartoon over and over again. My publisher is currently reevaluating the value of this syndicate and the work they provide to our chain of papers.”

That’s nice to hear.  It would also be nice if editors like him and others who have been using cheap, low quality syndicates like Cagle and hiring hacks whose work takes no chances whatsoever and is ridiculously derivative and old-fashioned, would hire those of us who actually take this profession seriously.

This little essay isn’t going to make me any new friends, but I am not the kind of person to sit on my hands and stay silent when there is finally a possibility to get the attention of the media. I love editorial cartooning. It is an incredibly powerful and, when done right, important art form. There isn’t much I can do about the terrible taste and priorities of many of the nation’s editors and website managers, but we artists need to hold ourselves to the highest possible standards.

I will have work, namely a display of some of the cartoons that appeared in my latest book about Pres. Obama, on display alongside other artists who have covered the president during his first term, at the Brooklyn arts exchange in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn New York this coming weekend. The event is this coming Friday and Saturday.

Although I will be in attendance, I am not at all certain whether or not I will be expected to speak. There was some talk of having me present my work, whatever that means, and maybe I will do that. But I’ve also been asked to prepare a PowerPoint presentation, or not prepare a PowerPoint presentation, or do a show of animated video, or not, and I really just have absolutely no idea whether I’m going to walk in, hang out, talk, or simply be executed like a Polish officer in the Soviet Union in 1940. It’s just so mysterious.

Anyway, take a look at the event and if it looks like something that you might be interested in seeing, go see it with the knowledge that you may or may not see me speak.