The New York Post has apologized — well, kinda — for Wednesday’s chimpanzee cartoon that critics labeled as racist.
The drawing, by cartoonist Sean Delonas, showed two police officers, gun smoking, standing over the body of a dead chimpanzee with two bullet holes in its chest. The caption reads: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
Critics said image likened the writer of the nation’s economic stimulus package, perhaps President Obama, to an ape. Hundreds of protestors on Thursday marched on the Post demanding an apology.
Post editor Col Allen said the cartoon was never meant to offend.
His statement reads as follows:
Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon – caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut – has created considerable controversy.
It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” one officer says.
It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.
Period.
But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.
This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.
However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.
To them, no apology is due.
Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.
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