Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Toles left Buffalo in 2002 to accept one of the most coveted jobs in his profession: editorial cartoonist at the Washington Post, heir to the legendary Herblock, who died in October 2001. His departure was, at best, bittersweet: One is pleased to see a Buffalo native reach the top of his profession, even if he goes elsewhere to do so; at the same time one wishes he were still around to cast an acerbic eye on local politics and public life.

At least we’ll have him back for the weekend. On Saturday, September 30, Toles will deliver the keynote address at the second in a three-part series called “Challenging the New Censorship,” presented by the University at Buffalo Humanities Institute and the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library at the library’s downtown branch. This second installment in the series, called “On the Front Lines: Journalists Assess the New Censorship,” begins with Toles’ remarks at 1pm. A panel discussion will follow at 1:30pm, with Toles, Buffalo News editor Margaret Sullivan, St. Bonaventure University School of Journalism and Mass Communication Dean Lee Coppola and this interviewer. The event is free and open to the public.

Toles was kind enough to speak with Artvoice about, among other things, his own experience of censorship and the role it plays as a subject for his work.

Artvoice: How often do you find yourself moved to address censorship in your work?

Tom Toles: I’d say, for what some might see as an in-house topic, pretty frequently. I’ve been looking through some of my cartoons for this talk and I find that I have addressed censorship directly—or something very close to it indirectly—a substantial percentage of the time.

AV: Can you offer some examples?

TT: It depends on how broadly you try to define it. I’ll start with some of the more obvious ones: With regard to the press directly I have done a cartoon about media consolidation—which I guess that is not quite so direct, but it’s on the subject. On Valerie Plame I did a cartoon on the irony of the fact that the only person who has been in jail so far with regard to that issue is a reporter [Judith Miller of the New York Times]. I did a cartoon on the White House paying a low-level journalist to write favorable stories. And just recently I did a cartoon on how there’s a revived threat to prosecute journalists for recieving classified information. I took that one step further and said that anyone reading a newspaper is receiving classified information.

Slightly more abstractly, I did a lot on White House efforts to move as slowly as possible with the 9/11 Commission, to cooperate as little as possible, to give as little information as possible, to slow it down, and Congressional efforts to slow it down, to postpone the release of embarrassing information.

AV: People often muddle censorship with related but separate issues. The Bush administration’s failure to cooperate with the 9/11 Commission and the threat to prosecute journalists who receive leaked information—those might both rise to the level of censorship. Whereas paying a journalist to write flattering stories isn’t censorship, it’s propaganda.

TT: Exactly…paying a reporter is not technically censorship; in some ways it’s the inverse of it. But it gets to the constellation of government control of information or manipulation of information. While not strictly in the narrowest sense censorship, it’s a related danger.

AV: Have you ever had an editor say, “I don’t think we can do that.”

TT: Only one time.

AV: What was the occasion?

TT: I’m not going to tell you. [Laughs.]

AV: Come on. Isn’t that censorship?

TT: It was in Buffalo, it was with regard to a local, prominent, nongovernmental person whom—for whatever reason—the editor felt it was an unfair criticism.

AV: Someone who was a public figure?

TT: They were a public figure.

AV: How’d that make you feel?

TT: More or less outraged. Because more or less my agreement with the last three newspapers I worked for has been that I will not be edited for content grounds, but only taste and libel. And I do not feel that one was either instance. It was neither one of those two controlling instances. That was the one and only time that has happened.

AV: In general it seems that editorial cartoonists have greater license to be outrageous than columnists. Is that true?

TT: I think it’s true that a picture has the ability to imply a lot more than might be said overtly. If you polled American politicial cartoonists right now, you would find a very high degree of satisfaction in the amount of latitude that they are ordinarily given. I think I’m probably at one end of that spectrum, and you’d find most cartoonists saying they were not given the same kind of freedom to make points that I have.

AV: Compare the environment for journalists in DC to the environment in Buffalo.

TT: In terms of local issues, it’s not much different—in fact it’s very similar. In terms of national issues, it’s very, very different. In some ways good and some ways not so good. When you’re doing national issues from a distance you get a perspective on them that sometimes you lose when you’re right here.

On the plus side of being here, it’s hard to describe the level of interest and the flow of information in this city—overtly and in casual conversations—to the degree that you have a highly different sense of what’s going on, who the players are, how they’re relating to each other, and an audience that is eagerly attuned to all of this inside baseball. I’ve likened it to sitting in the front row of the movie theater. It’s good and bad in all the same ways: You can see the nostril hairs here much more clearly, but there is a certain distortion that comes with being so close.

Another aspect—I mean, there are many—but the social network here does tend to add another level of distortion. So many people here know so many of the other people involved so well that sometimes, I think, objectivity suffers. There comes to be a language with which issues are spoken of. It’s a circumscribed language, in that certain points of view just aren’t represented. They become sort of off-limits, as if they’re in bad form. You hear discussions, back-channel discussions—so-and-so said such-and-such to somebody; these things often throw additonal light on what’s going on. But then again those channels are often abused and disinformation is sent out through those. The density of information and interest is so high here—you can find out a lot, but the context of everything is sometimes quite confusing.