Globe, Post Cancel 'Doonesbury' Strip

The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and several other major national newspapers refused to print last Tuesday's Doonesbury comic strip, which showed a character calling former Attorney General John N. Mitchell "guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty!" of participating in the Watergate bugging and its cover-up.

The Globe and the Post, in editorial page stories explaining why the strip (which is shown above) did not run, charged last week that it violates the "professional code of ethics" by presupposing guilt in a case that has not yet been heard in court.

Both papers also cancelled last Saturday's strip, which showed the same character--Megaphone Mark--implying that President Nixon was involved in the bugging.

The Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun and Newsday also refused to run the two strips.

Garry Trudeau, the New Haven, Conn. cartoonist who draws Doonesbury, said yesterday that individual strips have been cancelled in various newspapers several times in the two years Doonesbury has been syndicated, but that this is the first time the Post and the Globe have refused to run it.

Trudeau said the Post decided to cancel the Mitchell strip about two weeks before it was scheduled to run. The Globe's decision, he said, came after it learned of the Post's plans. "Since the Post is sort of the flagship of the Watergate press, the Globe thought it would be OK not to run the strip if the Post wasn't going to," Trudeau said.

"The strip was a statement by a character, not by me," he said. "It was meant to be a satiric representation of the euphoria of the anti-establishment types about the Watergate case. I wasn't using a character to make a statement--I was making a statement about a character."

Timothy Leland, assistant managing editor of the Globe, said yesterday, "We don't publish prejudicial material on the case prior to trial. The cartoon quite clearly indicated Attorney General Mitchell and said he was guilty. It was, at the very least, in poor taste."

Howard Simons, managing editor of the Post, said yesterday that the Post received "a hell of a lot of phone calls" Tuesday from people inquiring why the strip had not run. Simons stressed that the callers were not protesting the Post's reason for dropping Doonesbury, but only against the fact that it did not appear.

Trudeau said the Post got "four or five hundred phone calls the morning it didn't run--people assumed it was some form of censorship."

"It's very simple," Simons said. "Garry Trudeau is making a statement that we think ought to be made in due process of law. We do this kind of thing fairly regularly. We used to drop Feiffer sometimes--he got a little shrill. We drop Jack Anderson occasionally. It's called editing. It's a noble profession."