Why are editorial cartoonists always so far up their own asses?
The non-memey answer is that editorial cartoonists have been forced towards becoming a market just like basically every other institution in politics, an effect that only gets stronger with the increasing consolidation of the media market and sidelining of local papers and local editorial cartoonists. The consumers in this particular political market are even more heavily partisan today. Editorial cartooning, by general design, is supposed to cater toward people to educate them about the political scene, but a useful shortcut nowadays is to simply act as the artistic version of common talking points of the sort that eventually end up on MSNBC or FOX. A cartoonist whose name has slipped my mind brought this point up more eloquently than I could: editorial cartoons as we knew them have mostly been supplanted by memes as a medium for artistic expression of political lampoons, so cartoons have gradually evolved toward the same kind of thinking that drives modern meme culture.
(Steve Sack is not a partisan Democrat or DNC shill by any means but the Chauvin trial is high-profile enough that you can fully expect him and his fellow left-leaning cartoonists to put out very similar sentiments. The heada**ery on display here is a product of their political environment more than anything else, which is pretty ironic considering the innate subversion of the history of political cartooning.)
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