Click on image for full strip
Last week we told you that Salon was running two "Opus" cartoons, featuring spiritual seeker Lola Granola's stint as a "radical Islamist," that many newspapers, including the Washington Post, declined to publish. This week, Salon is running Berkeley Breathed's original, unedited version of the Lola Granola finale, and it's slightly different from the one approved for distribution to newspapers by the Washington Post Company.[..]
As I noted last week, Editor & Publisher and others reported that some newspapers had concerns about running a cartoon that might somehow be construed as insensitive to Muslims. I'd like to insert a line here about Salon's courage in running these two strips, but I didn't see anything that made me think twice about them -- except the news that others wouldn't publish them. We're proud to have Breathed as a contributor, and sad about what this episode says about newspaper publishing today.
