A controversial cartoonist has given his boss a blistering farewell speech after he was fired in a “throat-slitting exercise”.
Michael Leunig’s 55-year career at The Age came to an end last week when the Melbourne-based paper’s editor, Patrick Elligett, told subscribers the cartoonist had “submitted his last editorial illustration”.
But Leunig, 79, refuses to go quietly and sent a strongly worded farewell message to the paper, accusing its editors of censorship and calling it a “tasteless tabloid.”
He described his dismissal as a “cut-throat exercise” and was aggrieved that Elligett did not tell readers it was her decision to end her career.
“There was no mention of the fact that he (Elligett) gave me the axe,” Leunig said. The Australian.
‘I expected it, as I have distanced myself from The Age philosophically (and) culturally. I don’t really read it, I just skim through it. It’s a sad story because I started there when it was a major paper.
“I’m now embarrassed to say that I worked for The Age. It’s become a kind of tacky tabloid.”
Leunig, who began working for the paper in 1969, said the relationship between him and the paper became strained during the Covid pandemic.
Michael Leunig’s (pictured, top) 55-year career at The Age newspaper came to an end last week when the Melbourne-based paper’s editor Patrick Elligett (bottom) told subscribers the cartoonist had “submitted his last editorial illustration”.
But Leunig, 79, refuses to go quietly, bidding farewell to The Age by accusing its editors of censorship and calling it a “tasteless tabloid”.
The newspaper had been owned by Fairfax Media before being acquired by Nine Entertainment following a merger between the two companies in 2018.
Leunig is the latest star to be let go after the outlet laid off hundreds of employees in August as part of its $30 million cost-cutting plan.
The cartoonist made headlines when he shared an illustration that was rejected by then-editor Gay Alcorn because it was so critical of vaccine mandates.
Leunig’s cartoon, which never appeared in the paper, showed one of his typical frail, big-nosed figures in front of the silhouette of a tank with a syringe in place of a gun turret.
In the top left corner, the 76-year-old copied the iconic ‘Tank Man’ image, which shows a Beijing protester standing in the path of a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
He posted the drawing on his Instagram page with the word ‘mandate’, an act that eventually resulted in him being sacked from The Age’s news pages and left to submit just one cartoon a week for the weekend section.
“I had to raise questions, as many people did, about the severity of the Covid measures and that was intolerable, these things continued to be left unpublished without any explanation or discussion,” Leunig said.
‘It was like you had been sent to Coventry, you didn’t exist.
‘It was an almost solitary position, there was never any contact with anyone… They left me lying on a rock.’
The newspaper had been owned by Fairfax Media before it was acquired by Nine Entertainment following a merger between the two companies in 2018.
The cartoonist made national headlines when he shared a cartoon that was rejected by then-editor Gay Alcorn because it harshly criticized vaccine mandates (pictured)
Leunig said he had submitted numerous cartoons about former Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’ extreme lockdown measures during 2020.
But he says they were rejected for fear of upsetting The Age’s largely left-leaning, lockdown-friendly readers.
Daily Mail Australia has contacted Elligett and Nine Entertainment for comment.
Last week, Leunig wrote an article for his own website in which he accused The Age of censorship, claiming there was “a message passed down to him from above not to mention Gaza.”
“He evaded that instruction, but in a sense, he was left in the dark, with one hand tied behind his back,” Leunig wrote in the third person.
“It was obvious to him that the institution that most needed to be questioned, shaken up and satirised was the mainstream media, but of course that was off-limits.”
He accused the modern cartoon industry of being too “clever, clean and moralistic” and claimed that cartoonists “have neither the support nor the encouragement of brave or adventurous editors.”
‘“With a few terrific exceptions, mainstream Australian cartoonists can no longer be as funny, energetic and mischievous; they are not free enough, they don’t have as much ink on their hands as they used to, they are mostly over-educated, they don’t end up in court accused of offensive publication as they once did, they clamour too much for one-liners and the self-congratulatory accolades of cosy, dubious media awards, they don’t get the letter bombs and volumes of hate mail that were normal in earlier times,” he wrote.