Hundreds of protesters including film director Spike Lee called for a boycott of The New York Post, after its "tepid apology" for a political cartoon of a monkey they believe alludes to President Barack Obama.
"Don't buy the Post. Shut them down," demonstrators shouted outside News Corp. headquarters of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who owns the tabloid.
The protesters, most of them African-American, said they have gathered 4,000 signatures asking businesses to stop advertising in the Post unless its editor in chief is removed.
The cartoon that ran Wednesday on page six of the tabloid showed a policeman killing a monkey, which the newspaper said referred to an incident in Connecticut Monday in which an officer shot dead a chimpanzee that had seriously injured a woman.
In the drawing, another police officer comments: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
Sharpton on Wednesday called the cartoon "troubling" in view of past racist insults that compared African-Americans to monkeys, and said the cartoon was directly linked to Obama's signing of an economic stimulus bill the day before.
A loud protest Thursday outside News Corp. prompted a newspaper editorial saying the cartoon "was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill. Period.
"But it has been taken as something else -- as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism," said the editorial published Friday.
"This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize."
Obviously unsatisfied, the protesters headed by Sharpton and Lee pressed for a boycott of the tabloid.
"That cartoon insulted everybody," said the film director.
"It was a very tepid apology. It was no apology at all. The people that allowed this to happen need to take some responsibility and need to say why that happened, and that it will never happen again," protester Deborah Brown, 50, told AFP.
"It is ridiculous for them to believe that it makes sense to allow an untalented cartoonist to use violent racist imagery and believe that that is political humor. It is unbelievable," she added.
