The themed coverage issue is pernicious. A good example being The Guardian accepting money from a particular organisation to publish articles on agriculture. Even if they are identified as part of a series it amounts to lobby groups influencing content, and there is the effects also of what articles about agriculture they might reject because they don't fit what is required or because they don't need more articles on the same topic. Something that hasn't been mentioned is that media bias along political lines may not always be the best way to understand the problem. How journalists are trained has changed significantly since the 80s. Until then journalism was a career that was open to anyone who could write and included a significant diversity of socioeconomic backgrounds among it's reporters. This is no longer the case, most journalists now have at least undergraduate degrees in journalism and often masters degrees. At a paper like the NYT the majority went to elite universities and they are an even more rarefied bunch, people who can afford to live in NYC on a pittance for several years while establishing themselves. Strong community newspapers where many used to get their start in many cases no longer exist. This has really narrowed the type of person writing in the media. One way of reading to consider, rather than just looking at different news sources, is to try and follow a variety of really good columnists from a variety of backgrounds and political persuasions.

Right. I suppose I think the first point is that I would say that it is dangerous to take at face value the idea that a whole group of people think that all of these depictions are racist or problematic, just because some person has identified them as such. There is a tendency to take the voices of section of people as representative of the views of "the x community" and yet very often, they aren't. There are often all kinds of different points of view. In the worst case scenarios this can involve suppressing certain viewpoints within those communities and that can unfortunately involve all kinds of power struggles the public at large is unaware of. Who gets to speak for a community is not a clear question and very often it comes down to who says what the people shaping the conversation want to hear. I've seen an instance in recent times where this tendency was actually consciously exploited by one faction in a local community dispute where there was a significant battle as to which faction would represent the community in government negotiations - the tendency of the wider public to not ask questions and the media to prefer a simple narrative meant that one faction was able to present themselves as if they were the legitimate representatives of the community being and the state was, for bigoted reasons, was unwilling to recognise them - and it came very close to pushing the government into doing so. That's perhaps not a typical example, but in general it's worth being suspicious of any simple statements of what "the x community" says or thinks. There are almost always go-to voices that the media represent as leaders in these communities as if they are representative. The only way to really avoid this, and a better practice in any case in terms of really looking at problems, is simply to listen to what people say without attempting to impose some kind of unified voice, and also to subject ideas, whomever they come from, to tests like how do they relate to fist principles, do they make historical sense, are they applying this in context, are they mistaking what is meant to be a metaphor or ironic comment for a literal statement. And then there are larger questions, like what would be the effect overall of taking the action being proposed by those who dislike the image, because very often there are other, non-neutral outcomes. There are also thought exersises that can be useful, such as what would we think of a similar document from a similar period from another culture, or issues that can be difficult to understand at all and may need some expert input, such as, are we adding a modern gloss to this text or image that is just wholly anachronistic? My objection here with that image is particularly with some of the comments made - the idea that it's an offensive image because it depicts this imaginary vision as exotic, or shows them in dress that is out of date, or gets the shoes wrong. I would maintain that it is not offensive for a child in a book to imagine a person from a generation ago who they would never be likely to see in their town, and for it to be depicted as improbably and fun and exotic. Nor it is offensive that the illustrator didn't get all the details of dress right - not only was there less easy access to images at that time, and the style of image isn't realism anyway, but the focus on that kind of detail as being deeply important is only about five minutes old - to impose it on illustrators from any culture from more than half a century ago is inappropriate. (And as far as the earlier article posted about The Cat in the Hat, that is an embarrassment to scholarship and should be ripped to shreds by any literary critic - there is no way it should be allowed to stand as representative of what any community thinks about that book.) That's not to say there isn't more to think about those particular images, and I think picking apart the general tendency for all the images in the books to be exaggerated cartoons (yes, even the ones that are depicting white people) makes it particularly difficult with Seuss. But the willingness to accept reasoning like that above is a little disturbing. And the unwillingness to engage with the context of the decisions: the problems at the moment in children't publishing generally; the way young employees of publishers are threatening their publishing houses for publishing authors they disapprove of; the fact that what seems likely to be a financial decision is being presented as something else; and I think especially the very good APA letter copied earlier in the discussion which touches on the current environment in libraries and publishing houses, to the point of multiple posters simply denying that there is any cause for concern at all, there is a terribly passive attitude to considering what is really going on with this. Even the claim that it doesn't matter because they weren't popular books anyway. Even without asking whether they were worthwhile books, it's a strange statement. If no one was reading them, why the need for the statement? They weren't influencing people they just fall out of fashion like so many books do. If many people were reading them, then maybe they were valuable in some way or many people disagree that the problems in them are so serious, and so then you are talking about restricting texts.

Colour me shocked.

This is rather begging the question, don't you think?

It's difficult to comment on the pop song without knowing the content. But thee seems to be a pretty clear difference between disallowing a book to be reprinted, and saying everyone needs to read it to their kids, and a difference again from being worried about kids exposed to explicit imagery on film or in a song. FWIW I think not allowing kids to read books because they have magic in them is dumb, and I also think there is no good reason to avoid the LIW books. But it's not useful to claim there is one rule for every instance. My comment was specific - there is in many cases at the moment a very shallow and reactionary type of approach to deciding an image or text is racist, even ones aimed at children. The image of the supposedly Chinese character in the parade is an example of that, and it happens because people lack discernment. The equivalent is a Chinese book for kids, written 50 years ago and set in a small town where Europeans would be a rare sight, and a boy imagines a parade with an American cowboy, or an English gentleman in a top hat and spats - romantic images from a generation ago. It's in a cartoon style because all of the books are. I suspect responses would be better if the targets were more carefully chosen, and less performative.

When there is a larger pattern, in both universities and in publishing, and also particularly within children's publishing, of demanding books not be published, boycotting publishers, evicerating authors on Twitter, and deplatforming authors, I'm not sure how a statement like the one that's been made here can avoid being seen within that context. This is a huge issue in publishing generally, even if this was actually just totally unrelated, it would always be seen within the context of those things. I am quite aware of the different ways books (and people) can be suppressed, outright government bans are not the only concerning way that can happen. Did you read the document posted upthread signed by the APA, librarians association, and several others? As for why I am suspicious of the motives of the family, cynicism about capitalism is top of the list I suppose. But also - there was no need. As several people have pointed out, books go out of print all the time when they fall out of fashion or no longer fit social norms, or often because they don't contain much that is of value. They slip into obscurity. Most of these are books that weren't among the most popular and could easily have gone out of print (though at least one I think is among his more interesting books, but not popular so still unlikely to be reprinted.) There is something rather odd about announcing not reprinting a book you wouldn't reprint anyway.

Ah, TBH I don't really take the family's statement very seriously, I think it is disingenuous. I think they would not have reprinted those books anyway, for the same reasons many books aren't reprinted, and were looking for publicity in making the announcement this way. I also think it's very common now for people to be unable to put books that are older, even a little older, in the context of their time in the most basic kind of way. Picking out that particular illustration as racist suggests to me that is part of what is going on here, whether or not others are really problematic. If others really are problematic, there is no reason to pick out other ones which aren't. The larger question is around the way books are being evaluated, and yes, books, including in universities, are being suppressed. This is a serious concern among many university faculty members. People are looking at this as being related, and reasonably so given the way they have chosen to approach it.

I'd have said the illustration isn't meant to be an Asian-American, it's meant to be an Asian person from Asia, which would have been a rather odd thing to see in a sleepy mid-western town at that time. While the illustration isn't entirely accurate in its details, people in Asian countries in the mid 20th century did not necessarily dress like Americans. I have plenty of passed down family photos from the 50s where 99% of the people in the photos are dressed in what might be considered "stereotypically" Asian clothes. At the time those books were written, queues would still have been in worn within the memory of living people too - they only finally went out of style in the 20s, Geisel was born in 1911. It's not just attitudes that have changed since the book was published - people's exposure to other cultures was much more limited generally, there was a lot less travel, and history that now seems long gone was much closer. There's a kind of real self-centeredness involved in forgetting that.