A few months ago, I wrote here about an animated cartoon on the National Public Radio website entitled “Learn to Speak Tea Bag.” The cartoon, by satirist Mark Fiore, was a mock instructional video in which viewers were told that if they were “distracted by the confusing words of other languages” — for example, by the calm and rational discussion of health care reform — they could instead learn to speak “Tea Bag.” At that point, a figure began to yell, “Socialist! Socialist!”
“If you’re having trouble understanding the words of others or being understood yourself, use Tea Bag’s stronger, more descriptive words,” the cartoon narrator said. The figure then yelled, “Nazi! Nazi! Nazi!” The video took brief shots at Republican Reps. John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Michele Bachmann before envisioning a “paranoid future” in which people speak Tea Bag and walk around screaming “Nazi! — Socialist! — Baby killer!”
“Tea Bag,” the video concluded. “Because other languages are just too hard.”
The video, which was originally posted in November 2009, attracted a lot of criticism from conservatives. NPR officials declined to withdraw the cartoon — although they later added the label OPINION — but Alicia Shepard, NPR’s ombudsman, said it had significant problems. “Chief among them is it doesn’t fit with NPR values, one of which is a belief in civility and civil discourse,” Shepard wrote. “Fiore is talented, but this cartoon is just a mean-spirited attack on people who think differently than he does and doesn’t broaden the debate. It engages in the same kind of name-calling the cartoon supposedly mocks.”
The update: It was announced yesterday that Mark Fiore won the Pulitzer Prize, with the Pulitzer committee saying that his “biting wit, extensive research and ability to distill complex issues set a high standard for an emerging form of commentary.”
