Drawing the line

Satire is a potent ‘mixed dish’ – part entertainment, part outrage; part reality, part fiction. It thrives on simplification and exaggeration and often navigates the fine line between laughter and discomfort. As a part of my PhD research on satirical representations of political leaders, I interviewed several exceptionally talented cartoonists from around the world. Kevin ‘KAL’ Kallaugher was one of them, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, the first in-house political cartoonist for The Economist, and the creator of over 10,000 cartoons and more than 150 magazine covers published worldwide over nearly five decades. Last week, Kevin Kallaugher was abruptly dismissed from The Baltimore Sun, where he had worked as an editorial cartoonist since 1988.

The official reason provided by the paper was a cost-cutting move. However, Kallaugher, known for his sharp 'grotesquerie', suspects his termination was politically motivated, after The Baltimore Sun was purchased by David D. Smith, the executive chairman of the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Kallaugher recounts a meeting at Sinclair’s headquarters in December 2024 where Smith discussed a plan to hire a cartoonist who would be restricted to solely local matters and complained about the paper’s 'ultra-liberal cartoonist', apparently unaware he was speaking to Kallaugher himself.

‘The thing about being a cartoonist is that a single speck of sand, if it gets into the eye of a target that you're trying to get, it really bugs them a lot. This is the reason why cartoonists and satirists are sometimes the first people that get clamped down around the globe by any society that wants to be authoritarian,’ Kallaugher mentioned during our conversation back in August 2021.

At the time, he stressed that he was ‘often given a little more leeway’ than other cartoonists, owing to his ‘reputation as an opinion person’. But in 2024 things began to shift, as Kallaugher sensed his role was becoming increasingly precarious – a development that reflects broader patterns of newsroom restructuring and growing pressure on editorial cartoonists.

In May 2023, a renowned British cartoonist Martin Rowson faced intense backlash after publishing a Guardian cartoon that was widely criticised for invoking antisemitic tropes, prompting an immediate apology despite Rowson’s stated lack of intent. In February 2025, a controversial Jeff Danziger cartoon at The Palm Beach Post led to the firing of an editorial page editor amid accusations of antisemitism. Two weeks ago, Turkish Leman magazine’s Dogan Pehlevan was arrested over a cartoon accused of blasphemous depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Earlier this year, Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes announced her resignation from The Washington Post, citing an editorial decision to scrap a cartoon that included Post owner Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Mickey Mouse bowing to Donald Trump.

In Australia, satirical content has occasionally been at the centre of legal and public controversy. In 2016, Bill Leak’s cartoon in The Australian depicting an Aboriginal man forgetting his son’s name sparked a national debate about the balance between freedom of expression, satire, and racial vilification. A complaint under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act was filed but later dropped. In 2019, Mark Knight’s caricature of Serena Williams in the Herald Sun after her US Open outburst drew widespread international criticism for perceived racism and sexism. Although no formal legal complaint was filed, the cartoon was reviewed by the Australian Press Council, which compelled conversations about ethical standards in satirical illustration.

These conversations are ongoing. Satire and parody are strongly protected as free speech under the US First Amendment, with the Supreme Court affirming editorial cartoons’ essential democratic role in the Hustler v Falwell (1988) case and emphasising the need to protect ‘vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks’ on government and public officials. In contrast, Australia provides more limited and conditional protection, with the High Court recognising an implied freedom of speech only within the context of political communication, as established in Theophanous v. Herald & Weekly Times (1994).

Protecting cartoonists who operate at the intersection of journalism, satire, and political commentary is a complex and increasingly urgent challenge for a robust democracy.

‘If we’re being harassed and pressured not to aim our pens critically, we won’t be able to call ourselves editorial cartoonists much longer – we won’t be able to create anything but mushy, uncontroversial drawings’, warns Ann Telnaes.

And beyond politics, there’s the human dimension of satire. As Martin Rowson puts it: ‘It’s not about them – it’s about us. The purpose of political cartoons is not to change the way politicians behave or to make them resign in terror. It’s to allow us to laugh… The point of satire is to make life bearable’.

If that space disappears, we lose more than cartoons – we lose a vital mirror on ourselves.

References 
Kevin Kallaugher’s Substack post ‘Kal is Out at The Sun’: https://kaltoons.substack.com/p/kal-is-out-at-the-sun?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 

‘Maryland political cartoonist talks about state of his work after being let go by Sun’: https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/photos-maryland-political-cartoonist-kevin-kallaugher-sun-baltimore/ 

‘Truer than Reality’: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/08/montage-kal-kallaugher 

‘Baltimore Sun fires its longtime cartoonist, Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher’: https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2025/07/01/baltimore-sun-fires-its-longtime-cartoonist-kevin-kal-kallaugher/

‘Bite the air in Britain and you can taste the prejudices that haunt us. I’m sorry I became part of that’: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/26/britain-prejudices-cartoon-antisemitic-tropes 

‘Gannett newspaper fires editor for running ‘antisemitic’ cartoon on Gaza war following backlash’: https://nypost.com/2025/03/03/media/gannett-fires-journalist-for-running-cartoon-on-war-in-gaza/

‘Turkish cartoonist jailed pending trial over drawing accused of insulting Prophet’: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkish-cartoonist-jailed-pending-trial-over-drawing-accused-insulting-prophet-2025-07-02/ 

‘Why I'm quitting the Washington Post’: https://anntelnaes.substack.com/p/why-im-quitting-the-washington-post 

‘Bill Leak cartoon in The Australian an attack on Aboriginal people, Indigenous leader says’: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-04/cartoon-an-attack-on-aboriginal-people,-indigenous-leader-says/7689248 

‘Controversial Serena Williams cartoon did not breach media standards, Press Council finds’: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-25/serena-williams-cartoon-by-mark-knight-not-breach-of-standards/10844900 

Hustler v Falwell (1988) case: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1987/86-1278 

Theophanous v. Herald & Weekly Times (1994): https://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MelbULawRw/1994/28.pdf 

‘How social media has changed the landscape for editorial cartooning’: https://www.cjr.org/first_person/cartoon_ted_cruz_twitter_washington_post.php