Offensive cartoon brushes aside truth

Pretty much every columnist and blogger is going to give their righteous five minutes to the subject of Al Nisbet's cartoons in the Christchurch Press and Marlborough Express, and I feel I want to have a stab as well.

For those who haven't seen the cartoons, they depict overweight children and adults appearing to rip off the Breakfast in School's scheme, scoring free breakfasts and boasting the free meals will leave them more money for smokes, booze and Lotto. Several of the characters are brown-skinned.

Many have denounced the cartoons as racist, although race relations commissioner Susan Devoy has said they are not (although she concedes they are insensitive).

The editors say it was a judgment call, and point out other skin colours among the cartoon characters. The cartoonist is unrepentant, saying the cartoon clearly worked, judging from the reaction.

Others have pleaded freedom of speech, which I agree does include the right to be offensive. But what sets the greater bar for me is whether the cartoons are the truth.

Cartoonists are allowed a lot of leeway, a lot more than journalists. Exaggeration and metaphor is permitted. If they upset a reader, that could be a testimony to their success, suggests the Press Council.

But both printed journalism and cartoons must abide by the same threshold - accuracy.

For these cartoons to succeed and take the higher moral ground, the reader has to be confronted with the truth.

Earlier in my career I had the Porirua beat. Poverty on the Porirua East side is a real thing. Breakfasts in Schools was commonplace, and I went to a lot of them as a reporter.

These cartoons are saying people are cheating the Breakfast in Schools system. I have never had a sense of such a thing in the stories I've covered. What I have found, a lot of the time, is embarrassment that sometimes there isn't food in the house.

Perhaps it is true that adults will buy smokes, but will run out of food before payday. It probably happens a lot.

But I believe these cartoons fall short of a threshold of accuracy, in saying the "poor" are ripping off the system to their advantage. That is not truth. That is propaganda.