Joel EngelhardtBacklash over cartoon viewed as antisemitic leads to Tony Doris’ removal at The Palm Beach Post.
The owners of The Palm Beach Post fired Editorial Page Editor Tony Doris last month after the paper published a syndicated cartoon condemned as antisemitic.
Executives with Gannett, the nation’s largest daily news publisher with more than 200 newspapers and 19 in Florida, fired Doris on Feb. 17. They did not respond to requests for comment.
Doris, 67, had been editorial page editor since April 2021. He said he viewed the cartoon by Jeff Danziger of Counterpoint Media, which ran on Jan. 26, as anti-Israel but not antisemitic.
“They’re conflating criticism of the government of Israel with antisemitism,” Doris told Stet News. “I fully support Israel’s right to exist. … I think you can feel that way and still be open to discussion of the issue of violence that has taken place there. They don’t get to shut down the conversation just because they’re not comfortable with it.”
Doris said he was told he had been fired for violating Gannett guidelines and standards.
In “An Open letter to the Community” published Feb. 9 in The Post, the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County said the cartoon trivialized “the suffering of Israelis kidnapped and brutally held captive for 16 months” and “even worse, it spread dangerous antisemitic tropes, including the false and inflammatory accusation of bloodlust — a modern-day ‘blood libel’ used for centuries to incite hatred and violence against Jews.”
The full-page ad, co-signed by the federation’s Palm Beach Center to Combat Antisemitism & Hatred, continued: “We cannot stay silent. Hate speech turns into hate crimes. Journalism must inform, not incite. We welcome opportunities to work with media organizations to educate the public on the danger of antisemitism.”
Four days later, three Gannett executives came to West Palm Beach to meet with three federation representatives and a Florida regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Doris, who worked at The Post for 20 years, said he had been suspended and not allowed to attend the meeting. The following Monday, “it resulted in them firing their only Jewish editor,” he said.
Who attended meeting
Attending the meeting for Gannett were Rick Christie, The Post’s former executive editor who now oversees Gannett opinion sections statewide and has taken up Doris’ duties; Gannett Opinion Editor Michael McCarter; Gannett Vice President of Local News Michael Anastasi; and Florida Region Editor Wendy Powell.
One of the meeting attendees, federation CEO Michael Hoffman, told Stet News in an interview Sunday that the Gannett executives apologized, acknowledging the cartoon did not meet their standards and should not have been published.
They agreed to discuss offering antisemitism media training in all of Gannett’s Florida newsrooms.
Hoffman was joined at the Feb. 13 meeting by the Palm Beach Center’s executive director, Josephine Gon; federation publicist Alyson Seligman; and ADL Florida Senior Associate Regional Director Lonny Wilk.
They expressed concern over a cartoon that trivialized the plight of the Israeli hostages and adopted Hamas propaganda on the number of Palestinians killed, Hoffman said.
With the recent rise in antisemitic incidents, “They can’t put out these blanket statements in a cartoon that is in essence fueling hatred of the Jewish community,” he said.
Gannett Chief Content Officer Kristin Roberts later met with Hoffman and Gon to discuss coverage of the Gaza war and plans to educate Gannett’s journalists.
What the cartoon showed
The cartoon depicted two Israeli soldiers helping a hostage step over the bloody bodies of Palestinians with the headline, “Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Over a Year of Merciless War,” and the words “Watch your step.” The bodies are labeled “Over 40 thousand Palestinians killed.”
A Feb. 5 blog by Alan Newman, a West Palm Beach resident and supporter of Israel, published in The Times of Israel called the cartoon reminiscent of the most heinous antisemitic images of the Nazi era publication Der Stürmer.
“The cartoonist and the editorial staff that approved this gross misrepresentation of the post-October 7 Gaza War events sought to recreate Der Stürmer’s obscene, graphic blood libel caricatures of Germany’s Jews,” Newman wrote. “Isn’t the image of the trampling of the Gazans a throwback to the savage characterization by Der Stürmer of Jews poisoning Christians and taking the blood of innocent children? The portrayal of callous Israelis walking atop the myriad dead is beyond provocative.”
Danziger, an 81-year-old veteran cartoonist, told Stet News he never before had an editor fired over one of his cartoons. He said the cartoon criticized war as a solution, a product of his experience as a Vietnam combat veteran.
The idea of the cartoon is “you can’t make people do things because they’re afraid of bombings,” he said Friday from his home in Vermont.
Cartoons aim “to attract attention, not to bore people with anodyne opinions,” he said.
“The American ethic is you say what you think.”
Two letters to the editor
Added Doris, the cartoon’s message does not depend on a precise determination of the number of Palestinians who died.
“The point of the cartoon is to lament the violence that’s gone on there, without excusing the fact that Hamas barbarians started it all. It’s still been a mess of violence and people died and it’s a terrible thing and that’s what the cartoon showed.”
In 1991, when the United States stopped Israel from selling missile technology to apartheid South Africa, Post staff cartoonist Don Wright’s cartoon depicted a Hannukah menorah with intercontinental ballistic missiles in place of candles. It caused widespread consternation in the Jewish community, then-Editorial Page Editor Randy Schultz said Friday.
The paper’s response was to let critics submit letters to the editor, he said.
The Post ran two letters to the editor critical of the Danziger cartoon but turned down several others because they repeated the same message, Doris said.
Danziger, whose father was Jewish, said he was surprised that The Post, in an area with a large Jewish population, ran the cartoon. The Rutland Herald in Vermont, his home paper, also ran it, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America noted in a Jan. 31 post condemning the cartoon.
Afoul of Gannett endorsement policy
The firing came after Doris said he had been placed on probation for running afoul of Gannett’s ban on endorsing presidential candidates last fall. He said he wrote a draft editorial before the presidential election that he thought followed rules that allowed discussion of the pros and cons of the two candidates but stopped short of the word “endorse.”
McCarter, he said, criticized an unedited draft of the editorial because it suggested voters would be better off selecting Kamala Harris than Donald Trump.
Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, announced in October that its more than 200 publications, including USA Today, would not publish presidential endorsements.
The editorial, published on Oct. 30, spelled out The Post’s views on a variety of issues facing the candidates before urging voters to “please vote with that in mind.”
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to block publication of its endorsement of Harris last fall led to a surge of 300,000 canceled digital subscriptions, NPR reported in January.
“Newspapers need to be independent and strong and they’re just so withered now, they run scared with this,” The Post’s former editorial page editor, Schultz, said Friday. “What about the people who didn’t think it was antisemitic? What about the people who wanted to vote for Kamala Harris? After a while it cheapens the newspaper.
“A newspaper without a really active editorial page is one-dimensional.”
Joel is a founder, reporter and editor at Stet News. His award-winning newspaper career spanned more than 40 years, including 28 years at The Palm Beach Post, which he left in 2020. Joel lives with his wife in Palm Beach Gardens. He volunteers on the board of NAMI Palm Beach County and the Palm Beach Gardens Historical Society.
