Iowa farm cartoonist Rick Friday has been fired over one of his cartoons. The cartoon in question was poking fun at big agricultural firms. He said he did his research and presented the facts.
An advertiser (seed dealer) for the newspaper it runs in, Farm News, pulled their ads when they saw this cartoon. So, Friday’s 21-year career has ended over this issue. Here is Friday’s frustrated Facebook post about it:
“Again, I fall hard in the best interest of large corporations. I am no longer the Editorial Cartoonist for Farm News due to the attached cartoon which was published yesterday. Apparently a large company affiliated with one of the corporations mentioned in the cartoon was insulted and cancelled their advertisement with the paper, thus, resulting in the reprimand of my editor and cancellation of its Friday cartoons after 21 years of service and over 1,090 published cartoons to over 24,000 households per week in 33 counties of Iowa.”
Apparently, money has made our free press not so free anymore. We have our First Amendment right to a free press and to freedom of speech, but money is getting in the way of that.
An organization called Freedom House does a report on the status of the free press. They’re a watchdog organization that helps analyze how free the free press really is all over the world.
Here is one of their findings:
“Only 13 percent of the world’s population enjoys a Free press—that is, where coverage of political news is robust, the safety of journalists is guaranteed, state intrusion in media affairs is minimal, and the press is not subject to onerous legal or economic pressures.”
In America, freedom of expression is a key part of our democracy. It allows people to find information for themselves and participate in the political process. In the 1927 Supreme Court ruling of Whitney v. California, Justice Louie Brandeis wrote:
“Freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.”
Featured image via YouTube.
