Most people here now know that award-winning, Pulitzer-nominated cartoonist Rob Rogers was fired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week, for authoring cartoons that the paper’s owner’s deemed too critical of Donald Trump. In an op-ed published in today’s New York Times, Rogers, who worked for the paper for 25 years, explains the circumstances of his firing, and also details the descent of the Post-Gazette into a mouthpiece carrying water for the most corrupt and openly racist president that this country has ever known.
At a meeting last week with Keith Burris, the head of the paper’s editorial section, Rogers was told that since his cartoons appeared on the paper’s editorial page, they should reflect the “philosophy of the newspaper,” rather than his own views. In other words, if his cartoons would not adhere to the political views of the paper’s owners, he should start looking for another job.
That was a new one to me.
I was trained in a tradition in which editorial cartoonists are the live wires of a publication—as one former colleague put it, the “constant irritant.” Our job is to provoke readers in a way words alone can’t. Cartoonists are not illustrators for a publisher’s politics.
The paper is owned and published by John Robinson Block, a Trump supporter, who also owns the Toledo Blade. Below is the cartoon that got Rogers fired:
For Rogers, the Post-Gazette’s devolution into a thinly disguised propaganda outlet championing Trump’s policies culminated in an infamous and shameful editorial demanded and sanctioned by the Post-Gazette’s management in January. That editorial, published over the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, equated being accused of racism as “the new McCarthyism.” In the editorial, which attempted to justify Trump’s statements about not wanting to accept immigrants from “shithole countries,” the Post-Gazette’s’ editorial staff, following the guidance of management and its owner, contended that the term “racist” should only be applied to people such as mass murderer Dylann Roof. In other words, more subtle and less blatant expressions of racism should be condoned and tolerated, and by the way, the charge of “racism” was only being used to “delegitimize” Donald Trump.
By March, Rogers says, his cartoons were being systematically censored by Post-Gazette management for their anti-Trump content.
Things really changed for me in March, when management decided that my cartoons about the president were “too angry” and said I was “obsessed with Trump.” This about a president who has declared the free press one of the greatest threats to our country.
19 of Rogers’ cartoon proposals were rejected in a three month period, including six in one week. This kind of treatment for his work was completely unprecedented, and left Rogers bewildered. The Post-Gazette had determined to censor criticism of Trump’s actions and behavior—effectively transforming itself from an objective news source to a servile enabler for Trump’s xenophobic policies, and relinquishing any pretense of informing the public about their true nature and the harm those policies would cause. In short, it was fulfilling the tried-and-true textbook purpose of “official” censorship: to mislead the public at the bidding of the state. And Rogers stood as an obstacle to that purpose.
After so many years of punch lines and caricatures, skewering mayors and mullahs, the new regime at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette decided that The Donald trumped satire when it came to its editorial pages.
Ann Telnaes, a cartoonist for the Washington Post, believes Rogers’ firing is absolutely tied to the Trump administration’s vitriolic attacks on our free press; sadly, she does not expect his to be the last.
I realize now I didn’t recognize this other danger of an authoritarian president: his enablers and the willing supporters who squash dissent and help attack the free press and subvert the Constitution. The fact that Trump will use any opportunity to spread lies and whip up hatred toward journalists only enables his powerful supporters in the media to do his dirty work for him.
In closing, Rogers gratefully acknowledges the outpouring of support he has received since news of his firing went viral.
The paper may have taken an eraser to my cartoons. But I plan to be at my drawing table every day of this presidency.
As for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it neither deserves to be read, or even, really, to exist.