SMH · Monday 23 March 2026
SMH and The Age run their daily roundup of political cartoons as a standalone news article — a format that says more about the state of political journalism than any of the cartoons inside it.
When a masthead runs a daily cartoon roundup as a news article, it's not curation — it's a newspaper publishing its own X-ray. The images are doing the diagnostic work the prose abandoned somewhere between the paywall and the fifteenth sponsored content partnership. You don't file 'best of cartoons' when the rest of the paper is landing punches. You file it when the cartoons are the only section that isn't pulling them.