SMH · Monday 30 March 2026
SMH and The Age run their daily cartoon roundup, packaging political illustrations as standalone news content — raising the question of what the rest of the pages are for.
When a masthead runs a cartoon roundup as a standalone story, it's not curating — it's admitting the drawings carry the editorial line the opinion pages won't. The cartoonists aren't illustrating the news; they're doing the journalism the building around them has outsourced to access and adjacency. A newspaper that leads with its artists isn't celebrating them — it's confessing it has nothing left to say in prose.