Dissed again.

This time, it’s cartoonist Garry Trudeau knocking the Huffington Post for paying writers in “exposure.”

Trudeau is in good company: The Huffington Post has been dissed by the best, from Chris Hedges to Stephen Colbert. The first editorial cartoonist to win a Pulitzer Prize, the Doonesbury creator was just named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” by Time magazine...

In March 2012 the faculty at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, together with an Honorary Committee of alumni, selected “the 100 Outstanding Journalists in the United States in the Last 100 Years.” The list was selected from more than 300 nominees plus write-ins and was announced at a reception in honor of the 100th anniversary of journalism education at NYU on April 3, 2012...

We offer this as a disclaimer for content that will be appearing throughout the coming week on our Opinion Page.

You may have caught wind of a controversial series of cartoons from "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau. The issue was a series of cartoons focusing on a Texas law requiring ultrasounds for women seeking abortions.

You can't get much more hot-button than this, especially in the wake of issues like Rush Limbaugh's on-air insults directed at a woman, health-care insurance provision of birth control, the fact that it's Women's History Month and the fact that it's a presidential election year.

For those of you who have spent the whole of the last week in your local theater watching and rewatching John Carter and so have missed the news cycles, what that scamp Trudeau did this time was to use the platform his strip affords him as a venue for bleak humor about the indignities forced by Texas poobahs – those are male poobahs – on women seeking abortion. Trudeau wasn’t attacking the right-to-lifers per se, but only an unnecessary and humiliating “medical” procedure done down where the stars at night are big and bright...

A number of readers (more than a dozen) wrote or called to express disappointment or anger that The Post-Standard chose not to run a couple of #8220;Doonesbury” comic strips by Garry Trudeau last week. Some readers were very thoughtful, some simply called us names...

Like a number of other news organizations, the Orlando Sentinel chose not to publish a series of Doonesbury strips that focused on abortion. Specifically, Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau took aim at a 2011 Texas law signed by Gov. Rick Perry that in many cases forces women to undergo an invasive sonogram before they can get an abortion. Women are forced to listen as a doctor describes the fetus. Finally, women have to wait another 24 hours before they can get the abortion...

The calls and letters that poured in this week were filled with everything from eloquent musings to venomous epithets.

One reader demanded that I resign immediately. Others called me an idiot, or suggested the Star Tribune had been corrupted by conservatives.

The offense last week was the decision not to print five days' worth of Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" strips dealing with Texas abortion laws...

It was one week ago, of course, that Garry Trudeau first spoke about his then-upcoming abortion-law “Doonesbury” strips, when he told Comic Riffs that for him to avoid the vaginal-ultrasound debate would have been “comedy malpractice.”

Now that (most of) the dust has settled in the cartoon kerfuffle heard ‘round the media-political complex, it’s a fair time to see just how all this shook out...

Garry Trudeau has famously kicked up a fuss this week by using his Doonesbury strip to tackle the ultrasound mandates that states like Virginia and Texas have passed for women seeking abortions. I read an interview Trudeau did in the Washington Post and wondered if he might be up for answering a few more questions. To my fan-girl joy, he said yes. Here is our exchange over email...

Throughout this week, a series of Doonesbury comic strips by Garry Trudeau will discuss the topic of the Texas abortion law, enacted in 2011, that requires women requesting an abortion to submit to an transvaginal ultrasound. According to the law, abortion providers must perform the ultrasound, play the sounds of the fetal heartbeat and show and describe the images. Women can decline to view or hear during the procedure.,.