By Avery Mullen
- “Three hours sleep a night”: Michael de Adder’s Washington Post Odyssey
Publicly, cartoonist Michael de Adder’s exit from The Washington Post was uneventful. Privately, he faced sleepless nights and a new editorial regime that seemed determined to “get rid of” employees hired by the previous leadership.
De Adder, who was born in Moncton and now lives in Halifax, became one of a very few Canadians to draw political cartoons for a major, American news outlet when he was hired by the Post in 2021. But a change in management led to him being gradually iced out of the paper.
In a recent interview with economist David Campbell and retired pollster Don Mills on their Insights podcast, de Adder reflects on the experience and describes how he has responded by launching his own online subscription product, THE DeEP STATE
“I fought to keep it (the Post job),” he tells Campbell and Mills. “And when I didn’t have it, that night, I slept like a baby. I slept eight hours straight. It was the first great sleep I’d had in two years.
“I was like, ‘What the hell? Why did I fight so hard for that? Why would somebody fight so hard for something that gets you three hours of sleep every night?’ I’ve been sleeping fine ever since.”
With a fine arts degree from Mount Allison University, de Adder originally planned to be an oil painter. But even as a child, he had attempted to replicate the cartons he saw in MAD Magazine. His first foray into cartooning as a profession came at The Coast, a free newspaper in Halifax. Since then, he has gone on to work for major national outlets like The National Post and The Globe and Mail and even received an honorary doctorate from his old alma mater.
Michael DeAdder, photo from his blog.
His role at the Washington Post was originally meant to play out very differently. Hearing of a vacancy, he was offered the job nearly as soon as he expressed interest. That decision was made by Fred Hiatt, who ran the editorial page and was already a fan of de Adder’s work. In fact, de Adder later learned that Hiatt and his wife used to actively seek out his cartoons online.
Hiatt’s plan had been for de Adder to eventually replace the retiring Tom Toles as the Post’s “main cartoonist.” But Hiatt passed away shortly after hiring de Adder, and had been tight-lipped about his intentions.
The new editorial page boss, David Shipley, set about replacing much of Hiatt’s team with his own hires. Shipley informed de Adder that his space in the paper would be cut from three cartoons per week to one, prompting de Adder to tell his bosses he was resigning.
“At that point, I had said, ‘I quit,’” he recalls. “I said, ‘I can’t live off of that. I would rather announce that I quit and try to find a job somewhere else.’ They didn’t want me to leave yet. They wanted to get rid of me (on their own terms). … But I knew the writing was on the wall.”
In hindsight, de Adder tells Mills and Campbell, he should have made good on his plans to resign. Instead, the post offered him more money and he agreed to stay.
When his final cartoon for The Washington Post appeared in January of this year, the paper offered no public explanation for his departure. It was a March article in The Hill Times, an Ottawa news outlet in which de Adder’s work also appears, that eventually publicized his departure.
“My reward from the Washington Post is not working there anymore,” he quips. “It was keeping me up at night. Working for Fred Hiatt was fine. Working for the new crew wasn’t so fun for me.
“I don’t know how they treat the other cartoonists because I haven’t really talked to them. But for me personally, there were some head games going on.”
Reflecting on his departure, de Adder points to the fact that he was replaced by a cartoonist whose perspective is much more conservative than his own. However, his exit is also part of a broader decline in editorial cartooning as an industry.
As newspapers have seen their revenues collapse over the past couple of decades, he explains, they have cut their spending and grown less willing to risk offending readers. Increasing difficulty selling ad space, coupled with consumers that can be hesitant to purchase subscriptions and competition from social media, are impacting not just the field of journalism, but also editorial cartooning.
De Adder himself currently draws for The Hill Times, the Chronicle Herald and the Toronto Star, with plans to add another client to replace The Washington Post. He has so far resisted syndicating his work because he would earn as little as three dollars from some newspapers, though he is now reconsidering that stance.
“I think the newspaper industry will evolve into being some of the main players that are successful now — they’ll just become different — but all the other smaller, medium-sized newspapers, I think they’re doomed,” de Adder tells Mills and Campbell. “We’ll have a period of chaos until something else comes along. I don’t think what newspapers are going to turn into has been invented yet.”
From Michael DeAdder’s blog, a cartoon on US politics. The cartoon appeared in the Toronto Star.
