PD readers confused by witholding comic strip

By JULIE MOSS
The Plain Dealer decided not to publish a Non Sequitur comic Friday that depicts a bunny looking at a police lineup of other animals and saying, “They all really do look alike to me.” In its place was an editor's note that said dthe sdtrip  “was deemed objectionable.” Art Costanzo, 63, a self-professed lifetime reader of the paper, writes in a letter to the editor,  “The only thing I found controversial was the fact that you did not publish it.”

The paper left a blank spot where the strip would have appeared.

Lee Salem agrees. The president and editor of Universal, which syndicates Non Sequitur and other comics, said by email that pulling a strip is “a very rare occurrence (I scratched my head over that move), made more complicated for newspapers because the strip in question is so easily available from online sources. In many cases, the pulling of a strip or sequence just draws more attention to it.”
Salem said strips are pulled “maybe twice a year total,” including Doonesbury, which Universal syndicates:

In earlier times, Doonesbury was pulled more frequently, but I think more newspapers have a sense that many readers expect Doonesbury to be Doonesbury. And they prefer to avoid the headaches pulling a strip creates.

Those headaches for the Plain Dealer include more letters and 175 commendts on former columniar Conniw Schultz's faceboo page. 

No other papers pulled the strip, Salem said. Another Non Sequitur strip was pulled on December 3. And prior to that, a Non Sequitur srip titled "Where's Mohameed?" was pulled in October 2010.

[Source: Poynter Online