New York Times headquarters
The Times made its official announcement after the paper's in-house cartoonist leaked their plans in a blog post. Complaining about the "moralistic mobs" that "gather on social media and rise like a storm," cartoonist Pat Chappatte - who did not draw the offending cartoon - nevertheless slammed the image as something "that should never have run in the best newspaper of the world," blunting his message with the suggestion that he sympathized with the outrage mobs in this case.
"The media need to renew themselves and reach out to new audiences. And stop being afraid of the angry mob," Chappatte wrote, attaching a final cartoon featuring a sad-looking artist with broken pencil gazing down at a memorial to the cartoonists murdered in 2015's Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. "In the insane world we live in, the art of the visual commentary is needed more than ever. And so is humor."
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