A Magnum 'Opus'

Coverage on NBC's "Today." An article on foxnews.com and on chicagotribune.com. E-mail campaigns from a religious group.

About an item that some people didn't see in their newspaper. A comic strip.

Anyone doubting the power of the comics should remember the uproar over the decision by an estimated 25 newspapers, including some of the nation's most prominent ones, not to publish Berkeley Breathed's "Opus" on Aug. 26 and Sept. 2.

The strips feature ditzy Lola Granola, a character from "Bloom County" years, affecting various personae as she seeks self-fulfillment. In the Aug. 26 installment, she tries to look like a "radical Islamist." Previously (Aug. 19), Lola told Opus about practicing nude yoga while being Amish -- a strip that was published without controversy. It included a reference to the late Jerry Falwell, a longtime public figure.

In the Aug. 26 strip, we see what may be the first example on the comics pages of an Islamist-looking character other than a machine-gun toting terrorist. Comics historians will correct me within minutes if I'm wrong. And the final gag in the strip was a mild sex joke, deftly done in my view.

The Writers Group decided to call client editors' attention to the Aug. 26 strip and offer a previously published installment if they were uncomfortable with this one. This is routine -- though not all that frequent -- because we cannot edit every strip for local taste and sensibilities. Many papers carry strips and comics concepts that were popular in the 1950s.

All 200 newspapers were sent the advisory -- which, despite numerous published reports to the contrary, said nothing other than "please be sure to review the Opus strip for Aug. 26. ... If you feel you would like a substitute, please contact The Washington Post Writers Group." About 25 papers, including The Washington Post, told us they would not publish the strip and asked for a rerun. That meant the Sept. 2 strip also would not get in because it continued the story line.

A few editors gave us reasons why they felt the Aug. 26 strip was inappropriate. Some were so wildly off the mark that I began to wonder whether we were looking at the same piece of art. On the other hand, about 25 editors confirmed they would publish the strip and those who offered comments had lots of praise. The old adage in comics is true: equal measures of love and hate can be a good thing. People are excited, connected and engaged. That's what all newspaper people should want.

The news that at least a couple dozen newspapers would not publish the Aug. 26 strip broke on Friday, Aug. 24. Thus began a series of stories, reports and e-mail traffic that continues as I write this.

Also as I write this, not a single complaint from newspaper readers identifying themselves as Muslim. We spot-checked client newspapers. Nothing. The tsunami of complaints broke in two directions: (1) ridicule of mainstream media for lacking courage and (2) anger at MSM, mostly The Washington Post, for satirizing Christians previously but holding back about Muslims. Again, I wondered what strips some of these people were reading. An expert in Muslim culture has said that Lola's dress is clearly not representative of moderate Muslim women.

If I were to do this all over again, I wouldn't do anything different. The strips are groundbreaking and provocative, beautifully drawn and contemporary. They have nothing to do with Muslims and everything to do with Americans' lack of understanding of Muslims.

Maybe this posting will elicit comment about some sort of slight that I just don't see. As an old saying in the comics business goes, some people will find offense in every third stop sign.

There are three important lessons for everyone who publishes comics:

1. Comics are very very important and readers/viewers take them very very seriously. Ignore them at your peril.

2. A decision not to publish an installment must be made very very carefully. You are playing with fire.

3. Put your comics decisions in the hands of editors who read and appreciate them. You wouldn't edit copy from City Hall without reading up on the local news. Why is the comics page -- a daily collection of original art and commentary that may be read by 90 percent of your readers each week -- any different?

And for anyone reading this, please don't hesitate to contact me with your reaction -- good, bad or indifferent.

Alan Shearer is editorial director of The Washington Post Writers Group.

The Petraeus Watch

As I noted last week, blogging will remain light through Labor Day weekend. But if you haven't read them already, I wanted to call your attention to several columns dealing with the situation in Iraq. All serve to remind what is at stake as Americans await the progress reports -- to be delivered to Congress on Sept. 11 -- on the troop surge from Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker.

Charles Krauthammer sets the tone, noting a convergence of sorts. "In the last month ... as a consensus has emerged about realities in Iraq, a reasoned debate has begun," writes Krauthammer. "A number of fair-minded observers, both critics and supporters of the war, agree that the surge has yielded considerable military progress, while at the national political level the Maliki government remains a disaster."

Krauthammer notes that it all is coming down to this: "What do we do right now -- continue the surge or cut it short and begin withdrawal?"

As Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit would say, read the whole thing.

George F. Will, meanwhile, wonders if America isn't nearing a Weimar moment. "After the First World War, politics in Germany's new Weimar Republic were poisoned by the belief that the army had been poised for victory in 1918 and that one more surge could have turned the tide," Will writes. "Many Germans bitterly concluded that the political class, having lost its nerve and will to win, capitulated. The fact that fanciful analysis fed this rancor did not diminish its power."

Yet Jim Hoagland thinks President Bush went too far this week in comparing Iraq with the U.S. experience in leaving Indochina in 1975.

"It is not just that Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on Wednesday drew on a shaky grasp of history, spotlighted once again his own decision to sit out the Vietnam conflict, and played straight into his critics' most emotive arguments against him and the Republican Party," Hoagland argued.

"More important, Bush has called attention to the elephant that will be sitting in the room when his administration makes its politically vital report on Iraq to the nation next month. For Americans, the most important comparison will be this one: As Vietnam did, Iraq has become a failure even on its own terms -- whatever those terms are at any given moment."

E.J. Dionne Jr. thinks Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, given the attention he keeps getting from presidential candidates of both parties, might be the stealth candidate in the next year's race. But his conclusion makes its pretty clear that Dionne believes the vote will be a referendum on someone else: "No wonder our politicians find it so attractive to trash Maliki. He has become the punching bag for American failures. But come 2008, if things don't get better in Iraq, it is Bush's policies, not Maliki's, that American voters will judge."

You get the idea -- the reports from Petraeus and Crocker are going to be pretty big. The anticipation of them is already shaping the debate that will no doubt carry us all the way to the polls.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Rove-alicious

It will pretty much be light blogging the rest of this month of NFL preseason, formerly known as August. Many of the writers, editors and other staff here at The Writers Group are recharging their batteries with family vacations, while the news from inside the Beltway isn't exactly stop-the-presses urgent this time of year.

Er, excuse me, wasn't that about a pretty big deal this week when Karl Rove announced he was heading back to Texas? Depends. White House staffers come and go, but it's been obvious since the 2000 campaign that Rove wasn't any ol' White House staffer, so his departure, announced in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, did get the commentariat's juices flowing.

Michael Gerson wrote about the Rove he knows while assessing his impact on the Republican Party. Eugene Robinson thought the exit couldn't come soon enough. His message for the political operative President Bush has called "Boy Genus": "On your way out of the White House, don't let the screen door hit you where the dog should have bit you." And E.J. Dionne Jr. concluded that Rove's tenure was one of missed opportunities.

If you're playing the stock market, contributing to a 401(k), or trying to get a mortgage, the week was a nail-biter. George F. Will provides some perspective.

So does Kathleen Parker on a subject that has been much in the news of late: leaping to conclusions about guilt or innocence, in this case the dropping of charges against two Marines accused of participating in what has been called the "Haditha Massacre" in Iraq.

David S. Broder had coffee with former Sen. Fred Thompson, who told the dean of Washington correspondents that he wouldn't be running for president just for the "emoluments of the office." Read the whole article, because Broder has Thompson into the race.

Jim Hoagland, meanwhile, turned his attention to the Asian subcontinent, where India and Pakistan both observed the 60th anniversary of their independence from British rule. "New Delhi had the air of the capital of an emerging world power looking ahead into a promising, if complicated, future," Hoagland wrote. "Pakistan marked the same occasion by sinking deeper into the past."

And if you prefer a past when these hot, sticky days belonged exclusively to men who use bats and gloves and tour bases, rather than having to share August with a bunch of jocks who are playing meaningless exhibition games, then check out George F. Will on major league baseball umpire Bruce Froemming, and Charles Krauthammer on Rick Ankiel's spectacular return to the majors. Both are Naturals.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Pressing Issues

When people get together and talk about their trade, there's a term for it: shoptalk.

But in the news business, the talk long ago went out of the shop. With the advent of the Internet, it sometimes seems as though everyone is a media critic, and the mainstream media have become everyone's target.

I don't object. We need to listen to our readers and viewers, if only to discover that their complaints are often the same as the ones we used to discuss in the saloon down the street after our shifts had ended. Only today, the complaints come rolling across our computer screens in a never-ending cacophony of protest that challenges (pick your issue) our motivations, our judgment, our biases, our education, our religion or lack thereof, our parentage, and even our relationship with certain animals -- dogs and reptiles being the most preferred.

And this isn't coming just from e-mailers with time on their hands and a gripe they want aired; it's a staple of many of the popular blogs.

Again, I don't object. I'm at a loss, however, to explain why in the current amplified climate, griping about the media has turned into a crisis for the media. To me, it makes no sense. Yet the evidence is all around: Declining circulation and advertising revenues among print media, and declining ratings and advertising losses among broadcast media all point to the turbulence shaking mainstream media today.

As I write, the Internet buzz concerns a poll released this week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that seems to confirm the critics' contention that the storm has already gathered, and that mainstream media are doomed.

What's probably most striking, though, is the fact that Pew researchers found that much of the harsh criticism is Internet driven.

"The Internet news audience -- roughly a quarter of all Americans -- tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole," Pew reports. "People who rely on the Internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance."

And get a load of this: "The Internet news audience is particularly likely to criticize news organizations for their lack of empathy, their failure to 'stand up for America,' and political bias. Roughly two-thirds (68 percent) of those who get most of their news from the Internet say that news organizations do not care about the people they report on, and 53 percent believe that news organizations are too critical of America. By comparison, smaller percentages of the general public fault the press for not caring about people they report on (53 percent), and being too critical of America (43 percent)."

This I find astonishing. While it is true that the Pew survey noted a continuing overall downward trend in respect for news media, you could make a pretty good argument that the distrust is either highly exaggerated, or largely irrelevant. After all, Internet users most likely are tapping into news media Web sites to get their news. Even if they are going to the Drudge Report or Yahoo, what they are getting is coming from sources such as newspapers, broadcast outlets or The Associated Press.

But there does seem to be a certain amount of delight among the more active of the bloggers in pointing out errors, as if to confirm a thesis that the media are biased and thus not worthy of trust with anything so important as being a check on American democracy and governance. (Note to my fellow bloggers: politicians have been saying much the same thing for hundreds of years.)

In digesting this survey, what I think editors and publishers need to do is question their own strategies for dealing with the Internet. No, I'm not advocating ignoring it, or Internet users, for that matter.

Yet what the survey also tends to tell me is that readers and viewers value substance over fluff, accuracy over sloppy news-gathering, objectivity over agendas. Writing in Editor & Publisher, the magazine that bills itself the bible of the newspaper business, Iowa State University professor Michael Bugeja makes another point that editors too often have overlooked: Get your reporters out of the office and out into the community.

"Why would anybody trust a newspaper whose reporters they seldom see?" Bugeja asks. "It's as simple as that. We need more interaction and less interactivity."

I'll call that, and raise you a commitment to excellence that, sadly, seems to be slipping away as editors look for ways to meet the challenges of the Internet. Closing news bureaus, slashing content and laying off reporters, photographers and editors is probably not the correct way to win back the trust.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.