Thomas Nast was the editorial cartoonist of the NYTimes during the heyday of Thomas Marcy Tweed aka Boss Tweed. Tweed was the epitome of public corruption (bribes, kickbacks, and embezzlement). Nast savaged Tweed and his NYC cronies regularly on the editorial page of the daily. Tweed said, "I don't care what they write about me; it's them damn pitchers." Ben Sargent is a worthy descendant of Thomas Nast. Yesterday's pitcher skewered the Iranian wacko on his way out of the country. If this is (fair & balanced) visual savagery, so be it.
Ben Sargent (born 1948) is an American editorial cartoonist. Since 1974, he has been drawing editorial cartoons for the Austin American-Statesman. His cartoons are also distributed nationally by Universal Press Syndicate.
He was born in Amarillo, Texas, into a newspaper family. He learned the printing trade from age twelve and started working for the local daily as a proof runner at fourteen. He attended Amarillo College and received a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1970.
Sargent won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1982. He has also received awards from Women in Communications, Inc., Common Cause of Texas, and Cox Newspapers.
He is the author of Texas Statehouse Blues (1980) and Big Brother Blues (1984).
Sargent is married to Diane Holloway, television critic for the Austin American-Statesman, and he has two children, Elizabeth and Sam.
In a profile published in the January 2005 issue of The Good Life magazine, Sargent stated, "As a newspaper journalist, you're professionally obligated to be fair, accurate, complete and balanced. But there are two pages in the back of the paper where we're obligated to be fair, accurate and complete—but we don't have to be 'balanced.' I'm not a pollster. To me, you're obligated as an opinion journalist to express your views no matter what the politics of the day. If you don't, then people will say, 'Why should I read what this guy's saying? He doesn't even know where he stands?' That makes your position as an opinion journalist kind of useless."
Copyright © 2007 The Austin American-Statesman
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