Lazy reporters

A reader e-mailed me the URL to an article that appeared on the Chicago Tribune's website, where a reporter named Eric Zorn accuses Candorville of ripping off an old Peanuts cartoon.

Here's the original article:

CLOUDY

I recently took note here of this "Candorville" comic strip in the Tribune showing two of the characters lying on their backs on the top of a building:
Lemont: Susan, see that cloud? What's it look like to you?

Susan: Sort of like President Polk in 1848. And there's his mighty army coming down from the north to steal half of Mexico. Over there's the INS loading a group of migrant famr workers onto a bus for deportation.

Lemont: I see a bunny.
I said I was pretty sure I'd seen "Peanuts" use almost the identical joke. Several readers sent me the following dialogue from a 1960 "Peanuts" strip that creator Charles Schulz once reportedly named as one of his most popular ever:
Lucy: If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud formations...what do you think you see, Linus?

Linus: Well, those clouds up there look to me like the map of the British Honduras on the Caribbean...that cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor...and that group of clouds over there gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen...I can see the Apostle Paul standing there to one side....

Lucy: Uh huh....that's very good....what do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?

Charlie Brown: Well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind!
Coincidence? Homage? Rip-off?

I e-mailed "Candorville" creator Darrin Bell a week ago to ask for his explanation.

No answer yet.

The strip he mentioned was similar in structure to a recent Candorville strip, but c'mon. When you've got four panels to tell a story, there are only so many ways to do it. There are only so many ways to set up a gag and only so many punchlines that would be appropriate. I've seen Boondocks and Opus strips that are nearly identical to strips I drew years ago, but knowing the industry like I do, I realize this kind of thing is almost never a case of plagiarism. It's coincidence. Pick any cartoon in your local paper, and someone somewhere will have seen something very similar in one of the several million cartoons drawn in the past. In this case, they had to go back to 1960.

Still, I can accept skepticism. It's only natural. What I can't accept is lazy reporting.

My first journalism instructor, way back in high school, told us the definition of a lazy journalist is one who writes an accusatory article, and says the object of his attack "could not be reached for comment." Sometimes this is done by a procrastinating reporter who's working too close to deadline, and doesn't have time to properly track down the source. Other times, "couldn't be reached for comment" actually means "I didn't want to get a comment that would refute my assertions."

It's a rare thing indeed when you can't even contact the person's spokesman - which in this case would be my syndicate, the Washington Post Writers Group. The Tribune has the Writers Group telephone number, I'm sure, and logically, they would have been able to put Zorn in contact with the subject of his piece. A reporter working at one of the world's finest newspapers, you would think, would exhaust every weapon in his investigatory arsenal - even including the drastic measure of picking up a telephone - to get a quote from the subject of their article.

Zorn, however, ends his supposition by saying "I e-mailed 'Candorville' creator Darrin Bell a week ago to ask for his explanation.

No answer yet."

I never received any such e-mail from Mr. Zorn. Zorn could have called the Post Writers Group if he had really wanted to contact me. But that would mean he'd have to think of a different snarky ending for his article.

My high school journalism teacher would not be amused.

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A Zorn reader responded (see below) that I was inflating the issue by implying it appeared in the print edition instead of where it did appear - in Zorn's Tribune-hosted blog. I was incorrect in saying it ran in the paper. I assumed that, since Zorn is a Tribune reporter, it ran in the paper. But I don't see the significance of that observation. Was it meant to imply that something appearing on a newspaper's website doesn't need to be accurate or fair?

The kind of laziness evident in the Zorn article doesn't quite fall to the same level of a Jayson Blair, but it's somewhere in the same neighborhood.

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