Periodically, the content of the “Mallard Fillmore” strip on the comics pages sparks a run of letters from readers asking why “Mallard” is on the comics pages and “Doonesbury” on the Other Opinion page.
“Mallard” arrived at The N&O when our features department was revamping the comics pages, and the initial decision to add the strip to The N&O was made there. Later, when the department again was tweaking the comics, readers were allowed to vote on their favorites, and “Mallard” showed enough of a loyal following to warrant inclusion.
When readers began complaining about the strip, specifically that “Mallard” was in the comics while “Doonesbury” was on the op-ed page, The N&O’s former public editor Ted Vaden wrote two columns about it. In the first in January 2008, Vaden came down on the side of keeping the arrangement, saying, “The main argument for putting the two strips under the same roof is that treating two political strips separately is inconsistent. This is the place to trot out the old Emerson aphorism: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’ There are in comics several other strips with political commentary — ‘Candorville,’ for just one example.”
In an August 2008 column, once the election campaign was in full swing, Vaden decided The N&O should “pluck the duck,” saying “[Bruce] Tinsley’s cartoon has morphed from political satire to political propaganda, and the prospect is that it will get more partisan as the presidential campaign intensifies.”
In an October 2008 column, after readers voted on the comics, Executive Editor John Drescher took up the issue again, saying: “While some of you have viewed this as one of the great journalistic issues of our era, I don’t see it that way. I think each strip should run in The N&O, and it doesn’t matter that much that they run in different places.
“ ‘Mallard’ has earned its place in The N&O. Tinsley enjoys tweaking liberals and the media (he would say they are one and the same). That’s OK by me.
“When it comes to working in the public arena, he and I share the same philosophy. He doesn’t want to have a nice, quiet comic strip. And I don't want to have a nice, quiet newspaper. The more voices, the better. Let the duck quack and quack and quack.”
Click read more to read recent letters on the subject.
