Long-time Iowa farm cartoonist fired after creating this cartoon

http://www.kcci.com/news/longtime-iowa-farm-cartoonist-fired-after-creating-this-cartoon/39337816

by based2 • 10 years ago

119 80 10 years ago

based2• 10 years ago

src: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4hmvhl/longtime_iowa_...

gragas• 10 years ago

I'm an Iowa native. I find the cartoon itself pretty ridiculous. Why shouldn't CEOs of multibillion-dollar companies earn more than farmers? In addition, every single farmer I've ever met is very well off. In addition to the money made while farming, farmers are sitting on millions of dollars of land.

jccc• 10 years ago

I'm having trouble finding that part of the cartoon that suggested an Ag CEO should not make any more than an average farmer.

Could it be instead that the cartoon is about the scale of the difference? There is an actual number in the punchline.

[Edit: Nebraska native, by the way.]

lolc• 10 years ago

Well if they'd terminated the contract because he was not funny that would be one thing. But it seems he hit a nerve there no?

gpvos• 10 years ago

More like he hit their bottom line.

astrodust4• 10 years ago

It's not a question of more, running a multi-national corporation is obviously more responsibility, it's a question of the factor.

Every single farmer I've ever met is very well off.

Maybe you're in an area where the crops are in demand and your view is heavily biased.

qaq4• 10 years ago

And Larry and Sergey gave Sundar Pichai 200 mil. not to jump from Google and Steve gave Tim Cook 400 mil. to stay on. It's their private business how they compensate their executives.

mmanfrin2• 10 years ago

  Why shouldn't CEOs of multibillion-dollar companies earn more than 
  farmers

Every farmer. 3 people vs 2,129.

davidw2• 10 years ago

There are 2129 farmers in Iowa? I have to say that wasn't very clear.

alistairSH• 10 years ago

Except there are FAR more than 2129 farmers in Iowa. There are apparently >80,000 farms in Iowa and 130,000 farm operators.[1]

So, the CEOs of a few multi-national corporations make more than some undefined subset of farmers in Iowa. Are the 2129 the least successful farmers? The most? A random sampling? I assume the cartoonist meant something like 2129 * [average farm revenue] = sum(coo salaries)?

1 - https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/articles/edwards/EdwS...

jqm2• 10 years ago

Partially agree. I do happen to think the cartoon raises a very valid point.

But... having known a lot of farmers they are indeed usually quite well off. And many of them are not aweshucks salt of the earth types people often perceive, but rather more like a sort of spoiled generational semi-duke or noble type thing looking down upon the little non-land owning commoners who they often pay very little and sometimes wantonly abuse.

That being said.. what was the guy thinking? He has to know who financially supports the paper. Maybe he was ready to do something else.

zaphar• 10 years ago

I've known a lot of farmers too, admittedly none of them from Iowa, and none of them were like what you describe. Maybe it's due to regional differences but I'm inclined to think you exaggerated rather a lot there.

rabboRubble• 10 years ago

Agree with jccc... the point wasn't that a single farmer wasn't earning the same amount as 3 corporate CEOs, it was that the 3 CEOs earned more than 2000+ farmers combined.

Furthermore, I think you missed a level of insight about where the earning power is. That land may come with a mortgage and other liens. The trick is scrounging enough money to pay the mortgage every month on that land. Only after a lifetime of paying off the mortgage, does the typical farmer or rancher have enough equity in the land to make it a cash windfall when they sell.

I think the cartoon was commenting on the difficulty of making the farming business model work because of the tiny incoming cash flow from raising crops and being the frontline person working the land.

Laforet• 10 years ago

I agree. Not to mention that corn farming was not profitable at pre-recession commodity prices and even more so now without government subsidy.

In New Zealand, our main agricultural outputs (dairy and meat cattle) have recently gone into the unprofitable territory and it was only land speculation that kept the farms producing at the current level.

jkestner• 10 years ago

That's a naive view, and anecdata. Many farmers don't own their land but lease it. They're also subject to the whims of weather and the commodities market... not exactly a steady income.

onetimePete• 10 years ago

Alot also loose the land they had, to the banks over time and become glorified landscape facility managers for the bank or for example a energy company.

The guy in that "My-little-farm"-book you've read, might never have smiled so happy, and it might never have been his "little-farm". I know a lot of people who wont accept this though. You got to be rich, living the good life out there- else, where to daydream-escape towards from a day in the city.

inanutshellus• 10 years ago

The USA prides itself on free speech AND capitalism, but there are obvious conflicts of interest demonstrated here.

I imagine losing Monsanto (or whomever's) ad revenue will be very painful to Iowa Farm News... Anyway, it's clear that Iowa Farm News would never intentionally and will never again speak against a major ad source like Monsanto/DuPont/John Deere, and every other news source has been put on notice.

That's the newsworthy item - the illusion that news outlets aren't on a leash.

HillRat• 10 years ago

Median farm income in the United States is -$930. Yes, negative dollars. Almost every farmer -- basically the bottom 95% at least -- relies on off-farm household income, and just hopes to make enough farming to keep up with debt service and opex (assuming they didn't go into debt on seed, which can happen).

GunboatDiplomat• 10 years ago

Perhaps they should consider another line of work. If your bar isn't making money, or your hardware store is failing, no one suggests it's unfair the CEO of Budweiser makes more than many many bars combined, or the President of DeWalt makes hundreds of times more than a hardware store does. Why should it be different for farmers?

tropo• 10 years ago

Many of these farms actually make lots of money if you count the tax breaks. People buy lots of land for a giant house, but don't want to pay property tax for residential property. They'd rather pay at the rate for farm property. Add a few chickens or a horse and hey it's a farm!

mholt• 10 years ago

I'm also from Iowa. The value of farmland is complex, and I'd venture that a farmer is very lucky to be "sitting on millions of dollars of land" if that is indeed the case. (Our farm sold for very well less than a million dollars a few years ago.)

JabavuAdams• 10 years ago

What a ham-handed response! If they had just done nothing, this wouldn't be a story. Now, it's a scandal.

roywiggins2• 10 years ago

I am sympathetic to him, but there is no constitutional right to an unbought press (like he is quoted as alleging). Editorial independence is not enshrined by the Constitution. At all.

To clarify, this is obviously a bad thing if it happened like he says, but since the press is free, his employer is allowed to fire him and find someone who will express a different opinion. It's a pretty bonehead decision to fire someone over a nearly completely inoffensive cartoon though...

iherbig2• 10 years ago

I see this sort of defense a lot, and I find it interesting.

Some party does something many would find ill-conceived, reprehensible, or in some way greedy. Some other people come out declaring that the action wasn't illegal.

It's interesting to me, because often the legality of the situation isn't even in question (edit: as it is in this article).

stormbrew• 10 years ago

The defence comes up against the claim of infringed right to free speech, which is right there in the article. It doesn't come out of nowhere.

ambulancechaser• 10 years ago

In the article, the cartoonist mentions "“When it comes to altering someone’s opinion or someone’s voice for the purpose of wealth, I have a problem with that,” said Friday. “It’s our constitutional right to free speech and our constitutional right to free press.” "

The person above you is responding to the claim that this was unconstitutional, which is most certainly is not.

tghw2• 10 years ago

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/

chris_wot• 10 years ago

Yeah, but it's completely accurate though.

coldtea• 10 years ago

Editorial independence is not enshrined by the Constitution. At all.

So? That's another issue to fix, not a justification for this being a non-issue.

roywiggins2• 10 years ago

It is an issue. I was responding to the allegation in the article that the Constitution was supposed to protect against this sort of thing, which it isn't. Yellow journalism was the water the founding fathers swam in; editorial independence is a relatively new idea.

https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2012/12/19/breaking-down-...

It's a very good idea, and it should be preserved and fought for, but it's not an idea that has any basis in the Constitution.

"Not technically illegal" is not much of a claim to morality, obviously. Firing a cartoonist because an advertiser doesn't like him is against the public interest, and probably against the long-term interests of the paper itself; it's a bad idea and the people who did it should feel bad, and they deserve all the bad press they get.

dragonwriter2• 10 years ago

Editorial independence is not enshrined by the Constitution. At all.

That's -- still -- an understatement. The right to freedom of the press in the Constitution is exactly the right of the publisher to exert editorial control. Doing so is not merely not unconstitutional, it is Constitutionally protected.

You have no more Constitutional right to control someone else's press because "freedom of the press" than you have to direct someone else's vote because "right to vote".

rainsford• 10 years ago

The borrow from The West Wing, making sure Farm News can publish whatever it wants is the only way we can make sure The New York Times can publish whatever IT wants. Anything else is an extraordinarily slippery slope.

ball_of_lint2• 10 years ago

That is exactly wrong. The editor gets to pick what goes in the paper, who to employ and etc.

What this does say is that the editor didn't review the comic before printing it, and then fired the cartoonist after the fact. This seems unfair to me and I sympathize, but it is entirely within his rights.

skronch• 10 years ago

linking the actual comic in question (since it wasn't immediately obvious in the article): http://www.kcci.com/news/39341462

BHSPitMonkey• 10 years ago

Maybe he lost his job because it's just not a good comic. It's seriously just a written statement of fact needlessly wrapped in a drawing of two (identical?) people standing by a fence.

cloakandswagger• 10 years ago

Agreed. The cartoon isn't funny, subtle or provocative, so I'd fire him on those grounds alone.

hoodoof2• 10 years ago

Don't cross Monsanto...

randyrand• 10 years ago

Also known as, "Dont bite the hand that feeds you"

Gibbon1• 10 years ago

Difficulty we're drifting back into a world were there is only one hand.

slosh• 10 years ago

Somebody get this guy a scanner lol why bother with the news paper? He can just start an email newsletter and get more attention.

hk__2• 10 years ago

Attention doesn’t pay the bills.

slackstation• 10 years ago

There isn't even a semblance of editorial separation anymore.

That separation did good things like give people a reasonable expectation that what was presented was more or less unbiased facts. Now more than ever, we don't have that. If one is smart and looking for the truth, you have to cross-check with other sources.

One says you might have had to do that always but, now everything is suspect. I don't mean that conspiratorially, I mean I have to think, "Could someone profit from me thinking this is true?"

For everything. I wouldn't be surprised if someone manipulated the weather reports slightly to raise sales of coats and umbrellas. It'd be so easy and could make a significant difference. "Your Weather Report is brought to you by Burlington Coat Factory"

JoshTriplett• 10 years ago

One says you might have had to do that always but, now everything is suspect.

Everything was already suspect. I automatically distrust someone more if they claim a lack of bias, and trust someone slightly more if they explicitly disclose likely sources of bias. Given knowledge of someone's bias, I can weight the information they're providing more appropriately.

spb• 10 years ago

Related - this is one of the most-posted links on HN: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

avs7332• 10 years ago

paging Barbara Streisand...(yeah its not perfect but its close)

Seriously though, at what point do people in leadership positions really internalize the influence and power of digital social networks. Social networks are not new, the have existed and spread information(and opinions)since the dawn of our species. Online versions in some form have existed since the telegraph/phone/usenet/facebook (take your pick). You cannot control the flow or spread of information, and you have almost no control over the framing it is spread with. This is a story about a cartoonist, for farmers, in Iowa being discussed internationally...

For christ's sake consider alternate points of view before you act in haste. You can find people of all points of view on the internet, but they seem to be united in opposition to schadenfreude and generalized stupidity/hypocrisy/hamfisted-ness under the guise of 'scandal' and knocking others down a peg. Stop feeding the beast.

Zelphyr• 10 years ago

It probably wasn't even anyone that high up in those companies. It was probably some PR guy or gal. But the company spends so much in advertising with the publication that the mere mention of withdrawal of ad dollars was enough to get the owner or editor to back down and fire the cartoonist.

avs7332• 10 years ago

I get that...I feel like the PR guy/gal though should be the exact type to be aware of why reacting like this would be a problem

bdvholmes• 10 years ago

There is no cartoon on this page

hoodoof2• 10 years ago

It was so offensive that it connect be linked to.

nacs2• 10 years ago

Here you go: http://thumbsnap.com/i/V80Bg5ye.jpg?0503

nacs2• 10 years ago

Link to the cartoon: http://thumbsnap.com/i/V80Bg5ye.jpg?0503

buckbova• 10 years ago

A fun list of CEO compensation from 2015.

http://www.equilar.com/reports/17-2-100-largest-company-CEOs...

Do the top 3 tech giant CEOs on the list make more than 2192 of you?

goldbrick• 10 years ago

Unless the average of our 2192-strong sample is > $96,857 (doubt it), yes.

pklausler• 10 years ago

One wonders whether the corporate overlord in question also advertises on KCCI, and if more heads will roll.

basicplus2• 10 years ago

I think this encapsulates exactly what is wrong with the world we live in.. We humans need 1. Food and 2. shelter if the weather is too cold or hot.. everything else is a bonus.. and this shows our systems value the fundamental need of food below everything else, a world turned on its head.

aurora72• 10 years ago

If the same cartoon was drawn in Germany, no one would have been fired. A matter of Socialism vs Capitalism.

ibotty• 10 years ago

So there is Socialism in the USA? There sure as hell is Capitalism in Germany.

iisbum• 10 years ago

I'd be interested to know more about the process of getting the cartoon into the paper.

Surely if the cartoonist submitted it to the editor of the paper before it was published, shouldn't the editor be the one getting fired?

Long-time Iowa farm cartoonist fired after creating this cartoon

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