Cartoons

The current furor over Paul Conrad’s cartoons brings to mind an editorial by Theodore Glancey, who succeeded Harrison Gray Otis at the Santa Barbara Press in 1880. In opposing a candidate for district attorney, Glancey wrote, “For district attorney, a man who goes by the name of Gray, with how many aliases it is impossible to say, was nominated. The charity of our silence is more than he can expect.”

Whereupon Gray went to the office of the Press and shot Glancey dead. Otis (who probably was on the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea at the time of the attack) was, as you know, a man with an energetic editorial voice. Two years later, in The Times, he wrote that “newspapers should be edited by men who have honest convictions and steadily maintain them,” rather than changing their positions due to advertiser or political pressure. He then quoted, approvingly, George Curtis, “There is a legitimate and an illegitimate power of the press. A lion and a skunk both inspire terror.”

It is a mark of some civilization that today’s angry readers react only by canceling subscriptions and sending you letters of protest.

I join you in appreciation of vigorous journalism.

LAWRENCE S. DIETZ

Santa Monica