Last week the New York Post published this highly controversial cartoon. It was meant to connect two recent events: the passage of the economic stimulus bill and an attack on an elderly woman by a chimpanzee. But many have perceived it as a racist attack on President Obama.
Post Chairman Rupert Murdoch has since issued an apology, saying the cartoon had no racial connotations, and was only meant to "mock a badly written piece of legislation."
It is impossible to know what intentions cartoonist Sean Delonas had when creating it, but one has to wonder what the NY Post editors were thinking when they decided to publish such a provocative cartoon. At worst, it is a disgraceful example of racial bigotry. At best, it is a case of an extreme lack of editorial foresight.
Even if they think that the stimulus bill is 'so bad a monkey could have written it,' the Post editors had to have known that people would see it and think of old racial stereotypes of African Americans as apes. Just last year, there was controversy when someone created a t-shirt equating Obama to Curious George. Editors at the Post had to have seen this coming.
But maybe this is what they wanted; I'm sure their Web site has been getting lit up with people looking for the cartoon, and as the old saying goes, no publicity is bad publicity.
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