Whistle-Blower

My book blows the whistle on The New York Times’s censorship of Op-Ed art. Here’s an example:

To accompany a Letter to the Editor on the meteorological anomaly of a blizzard that followed a mild winter, Cathy Hull drew a thermometer. Though the thermometer registers 96 degrees, it’s covered with ice and surrounded by falling snow. My initial editors approved it. Yet seconds before the page was to close, this 2”-wide Letters drawing was killed. The editorial verdict? “It looks like an ejaculation.”

For Valentine’s Day, British artist Ronald Searle drew a finicky, trapeze-walking, female feline who is passing up proper suitors in favor of a raggedy rat. How could this be considered politically incorrect? “It implies,” my editor said, “that ladies love outlaws.”

When an Op-Ed essay proposed that all internet content be free, Nancy Stahl created a perfect digital image: a locked computer window is displaying a light bulb that’s emblazoned with a copyright sign. My editor said, in complete seriousness, “We can’t publish a bare breast and a nipple!”

To illustrate a text that laced into Henry Kissinger as a war criminal, David Levine drew a masterful back view of Kissinger tattooed with his war crimes. The problem was not the nudity, my editor claimed.  

“It’s the excessive midsection flesh.”