Dear Editor,

The People’s National Party considers your editorial cartoon of Friday, October 14 to be offensive to our party and to the hundreds of thousands of our members and supporters in Jamaica and overseas.

Friday’s cartoon follows an established pattern of vulgar attacks by your cartoonist on the PNP and its leadership. Such a pattern is a clear departure from the principle of fair editorial comment. Friday’s cartoon also referenced no public utterance on its subject but instead advanced an opinion which is inaccurate, biased and insulting.

This is despite the fact that the average age of the members of the Jamaica Labour Party Cabinet is higher than that of the leadership of the PNP or our Shadow Cabinet.

It is an established fact in publishing that editorial cartoons, like editorials, are reflective of the editorial positions of publications. As such, the PNP takes the publication of this particular editorial cartoon to be a statement and declaration of the Jamaica Observer’s political position. While precedent has been set in other countries, where media houses have endorsed particular political representatives and parties, basic ethics require that such endorsements be made openly and unequivocally, rather than in the clandestine manner which characterises the Jamaica Observer’s apparent approach.

If for any reason our foregoing view is not supported by the Jamaica Observer, then it behoves your management to determine whether your cartoonist is pursuing an agenda other than that of your newspaper.

Peter Bunting

General Secretary

People’s National Party

Kingston

Editor’s note: The editorial position of the Observer is stated in only one section of the newspaper on Page 8 in the daily publication and on Page 22 on Sundays. The Observer remains firmly committed to a policy of freedom of expression in which all views are allowed to contend, whether in columns, cartoons or letters.