May 10, 2003
(Updated) 'Doonesbury' Returns to Oregon
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
As we head into the home stretch of the campaign for Measure 26-48, it seems that Gary Trudeau is returning to Oregon for material:
The nationally syndicated cartoon on Monday launches another series that pokes fun at Oregon's continuing budget problems.
The new installment follows a "sad day for Portland" series that began Feb. 24 with a grim-faced teacher informing his students that Portland schools would have to cut 24 days from their school year. The students responded: "YEAA! YES! SWEET!"
This time around, the teacher has a Dickensian name: Mr. Miggleby.
The strip makes fun of just about everybody: students, teachers, parents and politicians. President Bush takes a hit in the final installment, for professing to "hear their cries" -- the cries of the rich, that is.
Along the way, "Doonesbury" mentions the shortened Hillsboro school year and the proposed Multnomah County tax increase, Measure 26-48, which would raise an estimated $128 million to $135 million annually for three years.
Rejection of the tax measure this month could cause teacher layoffs, bigger classes and elimination of some athletics. To which one of Miggleby's students pipes up: "Couldn't we just get rid of algebra?"
Much of the rest of the article points out other instances of recent portrayals of Oregon in the nation's media, with accompanying complaints about Oregon being perceived as "Mississippi with fir trees."
As was the case last time around, I will of course keep up with this latest run of strips here.
Update
For what it's worth, the above-linked Oregonian story also contains a good example of misconstrued over-simplification:
Dan Wieden, co-founder of Portland's Wieden + Kennedy advertising agency, writes in The Business Journal that Oregon would have to spend more than $5 million on a media campaign to counteract the influence that "Doonesbury" had with its first series on Portland's school budget crisis.
In order to see why this isn't quite accurate, let's look at the actual article for the actual quote:
Mr. Gary Trudeau. His Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip, Doonesbury, is carried in 1,400 papers across the country with a combined daily audience in excess of 165 million.
...
They say you can't buy publicity like that. Well, you can. If you have the money. But for the state of Oregon to run the equivalent ad campaign in national newspapers would cost in excess of $5 million. That's kind of a problem. Because the current budget for Oregon tourism, the best-funded marketing effort the state has, barely tops $500,000 a year. That's not enough.
According to my math, if we start immediately, it will take us until the year 2013 to equal the impact that Doonesbury accomplished in a mere five days.
So, in reality (although Wieden himself tries to push the comparison further), what was said was that to reach an audience comparable to that of "Doonesbury," we'd have to spend $5 million. Coming up with a dollar figure on the sheer amount of access to readers is not quite the same as defining an equitable impact in terms of message.
And, frankly, I remain skeptical that there is any serious long-lasting damage done to Oregon because of a series of "Doonesbury" strips. Any damage done to the image of Oregon is pretty much the responsibility of Oregon. Trudeau simply reported on that damage to the rest of the nation.