An August 2020 cartoon by Johannes Leak featured in The Australian (Image: The Australian)

The more you look at a cartoon, the more you see. That is both part of the magic of the medium — that it can convey so much more meaning than words alone — and a minefield.  

Once we begin to look too hard, it’s easy to see things that aren’t really there. It’s into that trap that, I think, the Australian Press Council has fallen in its determination that a 2020 Johannes Leak cartoon breached its standards.

Leak’s cartoon was published in The Australian in August last year, a day after then-presidential candidate Joe Biden had tweeted about his nomination of Kamala Harris as his running mate. Biden’s tweet went like this:

This morning, little girls woke up across this nation — especially Black and Brown girls who so often may feel overlooked and undervalued in our society — potentially seeing themselves in a new way: As the stuff of Presidents and Vice Presidents.

It seems obvious to me what Leak was attempting to do with his cartoon which depicted Biden referring to Vice-President Kamala Harris as a “little brown girl”. The sting of the cartoon was aimed at Biden; Leak was clearly suggesting, in very unsubtle terms, that Biden is a hypocrite. It is a fact that he has some uncomfortable past history with racial issues, in particular his opposition to aspects of desegregation policy in the 1970s. Biden probably was racist back then; almost all white Americans were.

Leak’s political satire is not particularly sharp or clever, and it can certainly be debated whether the point he was making about Biden was legitimate. He took words that Biden had intended to be benign and celebratory and twisted them into something unpleasant. Having an old white man call his running mate a “little brown girl” conveys racism and sexism, which Biden simply did not do by the words that he wrote.

The Press Council found that Leak’s cartoon breached its standards in that it failed to “avoid causing or contributing materially to substantial offence, distress or prejudice, unless doing so is sufficiently in the public interest”.

It found that the cartoon “not only attacks Joe Biden’s alleged hypocrisy but could also be interpreted as demeaning Kamala Harris and other women, particularly those of colour, by referring to her specifically as a ‘little brown girl’ “. Accordingly: “It could be seen to contribute to prejudice and to undermining measures to overcome the obstacles facing women, particularly those of colour.”

No. That’s just wrong. If anyone did interpret the cartoon that way — and I’m not saying they didn’t — then they, like the Press Council, missed the joke. The fact that it wasn’t a funny joke is beside the point. So is the fact that Leak was being unfair to Biden. 

To insist that the cartoon overstepped the line of what should be allowed to be said in public would be to say that, where the subjects of racism and sexism are concerned, irony and satire are absolutely off limits.

What makes this decision completely perplexing is the comparison with how the Press Council handled another controversial cartoon: Mark Knight’s 2018 depiction in the Herald Sun of Serena Williams having a tantrum at the US Open. To me that cartoon was patently racist, not in its subject matter or words but in the caricature of Williams, depicting her as a racial stereotype of an African-American woman with all the exaggerated features that trigger reflection of past horrors.

That form of cartooning — racial stereotyping — is revolting and plainly capable of causing deep offence and distress to its targets, as well as stoking racist sentiments. There is no public interest that justifies its use. Yet the Press Council thought otherwise and found no breach.

Either I’m missing the point completely, or the Press Council is. Either way, I find myself in the strange position of agreement with The Australian’s editorial this morning declaring the Press Council’s decision wrong.

There is another oddity here. In both the council’s published decision and The Australian’s response, nobody has named Leak. He’s just referred to as “the cartoonist”. This may be a change of policy by the council — in other recent decisions it also hasn’t identified journalists, only the publication*.

Perhaps the thinking is that since publishers have the final say, that’s where the liability lies and it would be unfair to name the creator. Or maybe there’s a concern about targeting individuals in this feral social media age. 

I don’t think any of that washes, however. The media is all about transparency and should apply that principle to itself just as much as it insists upon it for everyone else.  

Do you agree with Bradley’s opinion? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

*The APC has subsequently informed Crikey that Leak was not named as the adjudication was against the publication, not the individual. It is unclear why Mark Knight was named by the APC in 2018 and why the Australian did not name Leak in its editorial on the Biden-Harris matter.