WHEN POLITICS BECOMES A JOKE.(Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" comic strip)(Brief Article)

One of the chief objections to legal restrictions on campaign finance expenditures of the sort advocated by John McCain is that by restricting the capacity of office-seekers and their backers to circulate their views, they will increase voters' dependence on the media for political information. Given the leftward bias of most journalists, such restrictions will inevitably weaken the capacity of more conservative candidates to get their message across, and to respond to attacks.

One aspect of this media bias which has received little comment is found in the comics. For several decades, one of the most widely circulated comic strips, Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury," has devoted nearly half its time to sustained presentations of often scurrilous charges against Republican candidates and office holders. During the 1992 Presidential campaign, for instance, Trudeau produced numerous strips publicizing the testimony of a convicted felon that he had sold marijuana to Vice Presidential candidate Dan Quayle during the 1970s. The charges were generally recognized to be doubtful at the time, since the prisoner making them was serving a 50-year sentence for drug smuggling, perjury, and setting off bombs in an Indianapolis suburb, and no corroborating evidence for his claim had been discovered. But whereas any responsible news story would have had to acknowledge this doubtfulness, Trudeau was under no such constraint. Needless to say, although the charges were later demonstrated to have been a complete fabrication, the cartoonist never published an apology. (Even had he done so, the Presidential campaign was long over, the victor being a professed "non-inhaler.") ...