Tunisia’s Revolution In Cartoons

Tunisian’s political cartoons have, like the rest of the country, been suffocated. Any talented ones have either ditched the craft or gone underground.

While the news pages had been given mostly to hacks. Regime loyalists who produced propaganda cartoons. The rest avoided anything that would raise the ire of the regime and instead devoted cartoons to other matters, sometimes trivial stuff. But the nation’s papers have had their own revolutions: they are now free to publish what they want as they wish. And many have fired their editors who were seen as holding the regime line and journalists have taken control of their papers.

And the state media has changed as well. Initially a Ben Ali mouthpiece, it has now become a genuine example of a free press with diverse debates and openness and frankness are the rules. No longer stale it is not a Tunisian voice of the people with a new logo:
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The Los Angeles Times writes:

Tunisia faces a long six months before its transitional government holds elections for a new government that could set a precedent for democracy in an authoritarian Arab world. But the country’s media has taken to its new freedoms with stunning speed.

The ubiquitous ruling party of President Zine el Abidine ben Ali has disappeared. The watchful intelligence minders have slunk into hiding. The dreaded Ministry of Information, the country’s censor, has been abolished.

And journalists are having a ball.

Newspapers that once featured front-page articles lauding First Lady Leila ben Ali’s charitable works or the Interior Ministry’s efforts at keeping order — and always, always, always included front-page photographs of Ben Ali himself — now publish hard-hitting stories about the political rifts in the country, food shortages caused by the weeks of unrest and victims of human rights abuses emerging from the shadows of the former regime.

Television has also gotten into the act. Even state television, which renamed and relaunched itself Wednesday evening with little fanfare, is striving for a balance that might shame Fox News and MSNBC. On Wednesday, for example, it enthusiastically covered the arrival of an exiled opposition figure who opposes the transitional government. The next day it broadcast the full speech of transitional President Fouad Mebazaa, who was head of the lower house of parliament under Ben Ali, defending the government.

In between news bulletins and speeches, viewers called in to share their thoughts, questions or reports.

“Hopefully, all the stores will open soon,” said one viewer calling in to the previously state-controlled Hannibal television.”I swear by God for those who are dead, the martyrs, I will work for my country and its dignity.”

The journalists at La Presse began to revamp the paper Monday. Journalists who just weeks earlier suspected one another as informants began speaking openly. They started to get to know each other. After firing the managing director and demoting the editor to reporter, they elected an editorial leadership committee and set up a rotating editorship similar to the model used by the French daily Le Monde.

“The atmosphere was cool,” said Dami, 52. “We talked about what happened. We created committees and decided to take the newspaper into our hands.”

I have yet to get my hands on a Tunisian political cartoon, but here are some ones in English that are quite humorous and well-done, I believe.
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The revolution will be cartoonized!

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