한국영상문화학회

Political cartoons have been considered as a tool of monitoring the power of political authority, and giving critiques of current affairs. By representing reality with satirical, humorous images and uncommon insights, political cartoons provide excellent platform for encouraging participatory and critically responsive culture. Political cartoons have unique ability to present enjoyment and catharsis which are often void in the cold and objective rhetorics of journalism. This is the key to success for political cartoons to win hearts and respect of their readers, and thus was able to establish themselves as one of the most popular section in the newspaper editorials. On the other hand, it is also true that political cartoons played leading role in setting up biased messages and privatizing agendas to tarnish the discourse of truth while playing henchmen for the Yellow Press, which was notorious for practice of unethical journalism. This paper will examine the historicity and the actual practice of bi-partisan journalism, and also examine the form and content of political cartoons that have had a considerable impact on manipulating public opinions and international affairs. Two tragic events of 2005 and 2015, which resulted in many deaths, caused by the terror attacks in response of the offensive political cartoons will be discussed to put the problem of partiality in modern, post-truth perspective. While discussing the effect of the meme culture as possible replacement of political cartoons, this paper will analyze to put ‘disruption of truth’ in context of the Yellow Press and the post-truth age, which shows discerning similarity as well as some difference, mainly caused by the characteristics of transmedia environment.