We covered the Alabama last second loss to Auburn. Even that game became political when the Alabama student newspaper ran the cartoon featured above.
James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal reports:
This isn’t a sports column, but there’s a reason we opened with a nine-day-old play-by-play. Back in Tuscaloosa, the Alabama loss led to a kerfuffle last week involving the student newspaper, the perplexingly named Crimson White. Its cartoonist drew a strip, published Thursday, depicting the final play under the title “This Is What Happens in OBAMA’S AMERICA.” The last two words were in massive letters, drawn in horror-movie style, with what was supposed to look like blood dripping from them.Later that day, editor Mazie Bryant posted “A Statement From the Editor-in-Chief” in which she explained that “the cartoon was meant as satire . . . as a lighthearted look at some of the more absurd explanations given for Alabama’s collapse at the end of the Iron Bowl game against Auburn last Saturday.”Only in Obama’s America could something so obvious have eluded anyone. “Unfortunately,” Bryant noted, the cartoon “has been perceived by many readers as having racist intentions.”Such complaints are frivolous. The cartoon had no racial overtones. True, Davis, the hero of the game for Auburn, is black, but both teams are racially integrated. It seems, however, that the “racism” complaints centered not on the drawing but on the words–on the reference to President Obama, which likewise was without racial overtones….As it happens, this columnist has both an odd newfound curiosity about Auburn football and a longstanding expertise on campus cartoon controversies. (Our skill set is unique.) The former is a byproduct of our research into Auburn’s sham campus-justice system, which yielded an exposé on the pages of The Wall Street Journal Saturday. The latter dates back to an experience from our own college days, which this column detailed last May.
Who knew that running the Alabama-Auburn football cartoon would be the new test of journalistic courage.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY