Wow, a lot of mea culpa's this week — and a lot of people upset over cartoons, editors who apologized for cartoons they okayed, and cartoons that cartoonists apologized for.
First up, there are always two sides to every firing: The Jerusalem Post doubled down on its reasoning for canning editorial cartoonist Avi Katz (even as they keep the "offending cartoon" at the top of their webpage to garner clicks. Uh, hypocrite much, guys?)
To be fair to the Post, they at least *showed* the offending cartoon so readers have the proper visual context & can make their own decision if the cartoonists "went to far." There's a whole thread about it over on Twitter.
Of course, some people aren't buying it. Avi Katz's former editor comes to the defense of the cartoonist, calling his firing a "travesty."
Speaking of cartoons mocking people's appearance as a metaphor for their horrible ethical behavior: Mike Peterson at Comic Strip of the Day breaks down the controversy earlier this week over an unpublished piece cartoonist Jeff Danziger found himself apologizing for.
DD Degg also has a recap of the events as the manufactured outrage went viral.
In this case, the cartoonist is clearly making fun of woman's appearance. After filing the piece, Danziger had second thoughts and quickly pulled it. In the old days no one would have seen this cartoon or known that it had been killed. Here, however, someone with a political agenda apparently grabbed a digital copy and began blasting it out to as many news outlets as they could. All evidence points to someone who did this to discredit a cartoonist whose opinions someone disagreed with. Considering other people have been fired for less, not cool.
Finally, an Australian cartoonist had to apologize for a cartoon about the deadly wildfires in Greece that many Greeks found offensive. As with Tom Stiglich's Duck Boat cartoon last week, the cartoonist here was trying to make a comment about a tragedy, and condemning the loss of life. Somewhere along the line, that idea didn't get across to readers.