Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- The New York Post, a tabloid newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., apologized for an editorial cartoon that some public officials and black leaders said compared President Barack Obama to an ape.

The Feb. 18 drawing, by Post cartoonist Sean Delonas, showed two policemen over the body of a chimpanzee they’ve just shot as one officer says, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

The cartoon followed the police shooting of a chimp that had viciously mauled a woman earlier this week in Stamford, Connecticut.

Reverend Al Sharpton, the black leader and political activist, called the cartoon “troubling at best, given the racist attacks throughout history that have made African- Americans synonymous with monkeys,” in a statement posted on the Web site of the National Action Network, of which he is president.

The cartoon was “meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill. Period,” the Post said in an editorial in today’s editions. “But it has been taken as something else -- as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism. This most certainly was not its intent.”

The Post, which initially said it didn’t regret printing the cartoon, apologized “to those who were offended by the image.” U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, was among those elected officials who called the image offensive.

“There are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past -- and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback,” the unsigned editorial continued. “To them, no apology is due.”

Sharpton said on his Web site that he would lead a protest outside the Post’s midtown Manhattan office for a second day today.

“They seem to want to want to blame the offense on those who raised the issue, rather than take responsibility for what the Post did,” he said.

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Last Updated: February 20, 2009 09:29 EST