›› UPFRONT RONNIE COHEN
Mark Fiore may be the first Pulitzer winner whose career lineage includes both Jonathan Swift and Jay Ward.
The Pulitzer pulpit Fairfax animator can now ‘ridicule public figures’ like all get out! by Ronnie Co he n
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airfax cartoonist Mark Fiore first submitted his animated political comics for a Pulitzer Prize five years ago in what he describes as a passive-aggressive way, knowing full well that his videos would not qualify. Just a few days later, someone from Columbia University, which administers the coveted prizes, called Fiore to say he was ineligible for a Pulitzer because his cartoons appear online only, not in print as required, and would he prefer to have his $50 entry-fee check torn up or returned. Despite having his check destroyed, the self-syndicated cartoonist whose work appears on SFgate.com continued to devote considerable time to putting together entries for the highest honor in American journalism. Two years ago, the Pulitzer Prize administrators opened the competition to onlineonly entrants. Then, a few weeks ago, in what was a shock to Fiore, he won. The Pulitzer gives the 40-year-old liberal satirist the satisfaction of knowing he has unlocked doors for web-based journalists. The prize also comes with $10,000, national media attention and a podium from which Fiore already has scored a free-speech feat. In a turnabout that shows the continued power of an honor formerly wedded to a dying industry, the prize pushed Apple to take a second look at Fiore’s NewsToons iPhone application. In December, Apple rejected Fiore’s so-called app, saying it does what political cartoons do—“ridicules public figures.” In an email, Apple encouraged Fiore to resubmit NewsToons after stripping them of the offending material, such as a caricature of President Obama and the couple who slipped past a sleeping Secret Service to crash a White House party. 12 PACIFIC SUN APRIL 30 - MAY 6, 2010
Fiore had no intention of changing his work but did plan to argue that Apple had a responsibility to air journalistic satire on its platforms, though he had not gotten around to making the argument before winning the Pulitzer. A few days after the win, a writer for the Neiman Journalism Lab reported on the Internet that Apple had rejected the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s app. This was news to Apple CEO Steve Jobs who, it appears, instructed one of his employees to call Fiore and ask him to resubmit. Fiore resubmitted exactly the same application, and now the Apple store sells NewsToons. “I don’t think that would have happened if I hadn’t won the Pulitzer,” says Fiore, who does not own an iPhone and has had to borrow friends’ to try out his app. “It’s a great thing because it’s essentially forced Apple to backpedal on their policy about prohibiting ridiculing public figures.” No stranger to controversy, Fiore—whose NewsToons had shot to Apple’s top spot for a paid news app, as of this writing—plans to use the full weight of his Pulitzer bully pulpit to question what he sees as the computer giant’s misguided policy. On a recent weekday morning, Fiore offers me a seat on a comfortable chocolate brown couch and settles in his stocking feet into a wooden chair in the sunny, sparsely furnished living room of the home he and his wife, environmental consultant Chelsea Donovan, bought on a knoll near downtown Fairfax in September. He says pot growers lived in the house and wrecked the wood floors by overwatering the indoor plants before he and Donovan rescued it. While we talk, Donovan works on putting up the NewsToons app from the adjoining dining room. Slight, with mildly untamed chestnut-
brown hair, Fiore chuckles when he discuss- mal levels of right-wing lunacy, while others es Apple rejecting his cartoons because they need a little help,” she says. “If you waste your time worrying about infant mortality and the mock public figures. His website, www. 22,000 people who die each year because they markfiore.com, advertises the NewsToons don’t have health insurance, you need Rageapp above a red-box warning, which says, Ex so you can get back to worrying about “CAUTION: APP MAY RIDICULE PUBLIC FIGURES!” Fiore mocks not only pub- important things, like socialists infiltrating our great republic. lic figures but everyone and every position “Rage-Ex frees you his comics cover. In from the burdens of a recent Tweet on auditory, mental and his website directconversant strain and ing readers to a PBS treats you to wonNewsHour interview derfully apocalyptic with Fiore, he draws visions of imagined a verbal caricature doomsdays. Rage-Ex. of himself. “Watch Join the mob and for messy desk and leave the burdens of Andy Rooney eyerationality behind.” brows,” he writes. Much of the time His cartoons, Fiore puts into his which run up to twoOne of Fiore’s prize-winning entries, ‘Wall Street Execcartoons goes into minutes long, poke utive Air,’ depicts wealthy CEOs golden-parachuting researching facts supporting fun at global-warming from a plummeting economic aircraft. his point of view. For every naysayers, Tea Partiers, Republicans, Democrats, George W. Bush, the comic, he has a list of 15 to 25 news stories he has read in preparation. People who buy Catholic Church and Obama. Using his own NewsToons can download the background voice, the voices of friends and more recently stories. professional talent, he takes on gun control, “...his biting wit, extensive research and healthcare reform, gay marriage, torture, spyability to distill complex issues set a high staning, war and natural disasters. He painstakdard for an emerging form of commentary,” ingly researches every subject to get his facts the Pulitzer citation for Fiore says. straight but makes no pretense of objectivity. Born and raised in California, Fiore lived He describes himself as “a left-leaning, proin Portola Valley during his high school years, gay-marriage San Franciscan, Catholic, antiwhen he began drawing cartoons. He spent Bush, anti-Nader guy who guts his own fish, summers in Idaho with gun-toting relatives has cut down trees with a chain saw and took who belonged to the National Rifle Associapolitical science classes with Mary Cheney.” tion. The combination of the liberal Bay Area That’s the daughter of Dick—Fiore’s and right-wing Idaho shaped him politically. favorite target. “It was a good mixture,” he says. “You see Having recently recovered from a bout of that even though you might not agree with Dengue fever contracted in Mexico while on someone, they can still be a great person. Even his first vacation in eight years, Fiore says he was working at home in his living room when with Dick Cheney, who I think is probably the closest to evil, it’s so much more fun to an editor to whom he had been trying to sell poke fun at him and to treat him as a flawed his cartoons called to congratulate him on human than the devil incarnate. winning the Pulitzer. It was the first he had “You’ve definitely got to have fun with it, heard about the prize. and at the very least, it’s fostering discussion. Some of the 15 cartoons for which Fiore If there is one thing that my politically mixed won the Pulitzer deal with climate change, San Francisco/Idaho background has taught credit-card reform, the recession, the Wall Street bailout, Obama and California’s budget me, it is the benefit of continuing a discussion even if you don’t agree.” woes. One of the winner strips is set to the After a short stint as a staff cartoontune of “Monster Mash.” “Once our profits ist for the San Jose Mercury News, Fiore have sank,” Fiore’s version of the toe-tapping turned to animation and freelance work in song goes, “we do the Zombie Bank.” the late 1990s. In another of the winning cartoons, Fiore Fiore recalled his newspaper days recently imitates the safety spiel flight attendants when discussing Apple’s initial iPhone app recite before takeoff. “Welcome aboard Wall rejection. “When you ask a political cartoonStreet Executive Air, Flight 2009 with service ist to change something about the political to economic disaster,” a woman announces content of their work, their usual impulse is to as the video shows overweight, grinning do the exact opposite,” he says. “For example, businessmen chewing on fat cigars inside a back when I worked for a newspaper, I was plane equipped with a chandelier. “All losses told by the new publisher to go easier on must be extinguished by passing them onto George W. Bush, which promptly caused me the taxpayer. Tampering with, disabling or to go harder on Bush. destroying our economy is encouraged and “Which, um, led me out the door, where I even rewarded.” happily returned to working for myself.” ✹ Many of Fiore’s comics mimic advertisements. In another from his winning Pulitzer Contact Ronnie Cohen at ronniecohen@comcast.net. entry, a woman who sounds like she could be Watch one of Mark’s cartoons at reading a Prozac ad talks about a drug called ›› pacificsun.com “Rage-Ex.” “Some people are born with nor-