As the grandson of former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and former LDS Church president Ezra Taft Benson, he attended Brigham Young University, from which he graduated cum laude, and became the cartoonist for the Arizona Republic in 1980.

[1] He moved to the Tacoma Morning News Tribune in 1990,[2] but then returned to the Arizona Republic in 1991,[1] and remained until laid off in January 2019.

[3][4] Benson is now the staff political cartoonist for the Arizona Mirror and his work continues to be nationally distributed by Creators Syndicate.

[11] In the midst of the scandal, Governor Mecham telephoned Benson and told him to stop drawing critical cartoons about him, or his eternal soul would be in jeopardy.

"[17][18] In 1997, a Benson cartoon used the image of a firefighter carrying a dead child to comment on the death sentence that had just been imposed on Oklahoma City bombing defendant Timothy McVeigh.