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posted by CoolHand on Thursday May 05 2016, @03:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the hashtag-cowspiracy dept.

Food Politics reports that Rick Friday, a long time cartoonist for Farm News, was dismissed for offending "a large company affiliated with one of the corporations mentioned in a cartoon." The political cartoon is critical of Big Ag CEOs, which earned more than 2,000 Iowa farmers combined.

In a Facebook post the cartoonist, Rick Friday, explained:

I am no longer the Editorial Cartoonist for Farm News due to the attached cartoon which was published yesterday. Apparently a large company affiliated with one of the corporations mentioned in the cartoon was insulted and cancelled their advertisement with the paper, thus, resulting in the reprimand of my editor and cancellation of It's Friday cartoons after 21 years of service and over 1090 published cartoons to over 24,000 households per week in 33 counties of Iowa.

I did my research and only submitted the facts in my cartoon.

That's okay, hopefully my children and my grandchildren will see that this last cartoon published by Farm News out of Fort Dodge, Iowa, will shine light on how fragile our rights to free speech and free press really are in the country.

The Des Moines Register explains further:

The CEOs at the ag giants earned about $52.9 million last year, based on Morningstar data. Monsanto and DuPont, the parent of Johnston-based Pioneer, are large seed and chemical companies, and Deere is a large farm equipment manufacturer.

Profits for the three companies, all with large operations across Iowa, also have declined as farm income has been squeezed. After peaking in 2013, U.S. farm income this year is projected to fall to $183 billion, its lowest level since 2002.

It seems like in the U.S. you free to say what you like, but if you offend the wrong people you're free to lose your job despite the protections you are provided and encouraged to use.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by EvilSS on Thursday May 05 2016, @03:26PM

    by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 05 2016, @03:26PM (#342065)

    It seems like in the U.S. you free to say what you like, but if you offend the wrong people you're free to lose your job despite the protections you are provided and encouraged to use.

     
    Those protections are from GOVERNMENT interference in speech. Except in very narrow instances. they do NOT protect you from any private repercussions, as is the case here. There is a tradition (fragile, but still) of news outlets protecting their reporters/editorialists from consequences of negative reporting or opinions of advertisers, but it's not the law of the land by any stretch.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday May 05 2016, @03:58PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 05 2016, @03:58PM (#342077) Journal

    Which is why we need guiltiness for these rich douches yesterday, not tomorrow. They're gaining more de facto power over our lives than our government.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2016, @04:19AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2016, @04:19AM (#342412)

      Which is why we need guiltiness for these rich douches yesterday, not tomorrow. They're gaining more de facto power over our lives than our government.

      I think they have plenty of guiltiness already. Did you mean guillotines?

      /clippy mode

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @04:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @04:19PM (#342086)

    Yep, just like with Brendan Eich....

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday May 05 2016, @04:26PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Thursday May 05 2016, @04:26PM (#342089)

    To reiterate ikanreed's point: at what point point should we consider the mega-corporations part of the government?

    The Trans-Pacific Partnership was negotiated in secret for 5 years. Elected representatives did not have access to the drafts, but corporate representatives sure did.

    There is also the problem of regulatory capture where people regulating industry, later get hired by the same industry (and vice versa). That particular problem is not even easy to avoid, because you want regulators to have some industry experience.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by MrGuy on Thursday May 05 2016, @05:13PM

      by MrGuy (1007) on Thursday May 05 2016, @05:13PM (#342118)

      To reiterate ikanreed's point: at what point point should we consider the mega-corporations part of the government?

      When they start using the machinery of the government to enact their private revenge, we can talk. Otherwise, this is anti-government "big corporations are never in the right!" partisan bullcrap.

      The cartoonist did not suddenly get audited by the IRS, or get pulled over for going 3 miles over the speed limit, or have a "mistaken" SWAT raid on his house. There's no indication - absolutely none - that any government or even government-like pressure was instituted.

      If I make loud, public statements that criticize my employer, and they fire me, that's not them acting like they're part of the government. That's them acting like my employer. Yes, they have the right to fire me. Free speech does not and has never implied you can say whatever you want, and no one is allowed to attach any consequences to that speech.

      In this case, the cartoonist isn't criticizing his employer, but his employer's clients. And those clients did not go to the FBI, or the city council to try to take revenge. Instead, those companies decided to complain to the published, and pulled their advertising. This is completely private action. Does this imply the corporation has a lot of power over the companies that carry their advertisements? Sure does. But that's not a government issue. That's a private enterprise issue.

      If you want to criticize an industry, you're free to do so. If the cartoonist had published this as a private citizen, there's no indication that the corporations criticized would "act like a government" and try to criminalize those actions. You can say "Well, maybe they would have!" but that's a discussion about our respective opinions on what a corporation WOULD do. Not what they did.

      When you take someone's money for a platform, you shouldn't be entirely surprised if they don't like your criticism and decide not to keep funding you. That's always been an issue with the notion of advertising-supported journalism.

      • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday May 05 2016, @05:21PM

        by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Thursday May 05 2016, @05:21PM (#342121)

        I guess where I was going was a lot of infrastructure is privately owned. We are told that the government can't provide services such as telecommunication because that would be "inefficient"; never mind that it is a natural monopoly.

        There is also not much of a social safety net to speak of in the US. You can lose your livelihood if you upset the wrong person.

      • (Score: 1) by quintessence on Thursday May 05 2016, @08:51PM

        by quintessence (6227) on Thursday May 05 2016, @08:51PM (#342244)

        Free speech does not and has never implied you can say whatever you want, and no one is allowed to attach any consequences to that speech.

        This is disingenuous in the extreme, as if the only people compelled not to act like asshats regarding free speech is the government. It's an inability to differentiate being fired for saying "fuck you" to customers who walk in, and being fired because you have a Republican bumper sticker on your vehicle, let alone the notion the government often operates through proxies (ECHLON for starters to required to report statues).

        Categorically the days of slavery ended a while ago. Just because you pay a wage doesn't give you cart blanch to impose yourself on your employees. If the cartoonist wanted to push the issue, he could probably mount a wrongful dismissal suit. But this "it wasn't censorship because it wasn't the government, yuck, yuck" is just uninformed, misguided, and distasteful.

  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday May 05 2016, @08:30PM

    by sjames (2882) on Thursday May 05 2016, @08:30PM (#342225) Journal

    The lack of a legal obligation does not imply the lack of a moral or ethical obligation.

    • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday May 06 2016, @04:17PM

      by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 06 2016, @04:17PM (#342596)

      True, but it still doesn't changed the fact that there is no legal "protection" in this case.