Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Cartoonist Rob Roberts Fired for Depicting the Real Trump
Cartoonist Rob Rogers was fired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for refusing to do cartoons extolling the virtues and accomplishments of Trump. According to The Association of American Cartoonists; “Rob Rogers is one of the best in the country and his cartoons have been a wildly popular feature of the Post-Gazette. Readers looked forward each morning to opening their papers to see Rogers’ latest pointed commentary.”
Things changed for Rob when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette hired Keith Burris as its Editorial Page Editor. Just weeks earlier and before Rob Rogers was let go, Editor Keith Burns had written about meeting a self-proclaimed classical liberal; ”To be a liberal: five principles
2) Free speech is essential.
Freedom of speech and expression is the sine qua non of tolerance and pluralism — the grammar of tolerance; the way we make the principle work.
Liberals fight for the right of every thinker and seeker to pursue his truth, to share it, and to be heard.
The greatest liberal thinker of the 20th century, Isaiah Berlin, said: “The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.”
Perhaps this rational by Mr. Burris did not apply to Rob Rogers and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had a different idea of what liberalism meant within the confines of its employment. One commenter to Burris’s editorial claimed “Keith wants us to be the ‘right’ kind of liberals” and another said “Keith Burris defining a liberal is like Donald Trump defining femininity.”
Keith Burris in an editorial for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette came out in defense of Donald Trump calling some nations “shithole countries.” Entitled “Reason as racism,” Keith Burris argued that calling someone a racist is “the new McCarthyism” defending the sentiment behind President Donald Trump’s reported suggestion the United States take immigrants from an overwhelmingly white country such as Norway rather than “shithole countries” like Haiti or from continents such as Africa.
Representing 150 employees at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh in a letter to the editor it was “collectively appalled and crestfallen by the repugnant editorial.”
It may be that Rob Roberts no longer meets the qualifications of being a cartoonists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by not conforming to the political stance taken by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Keith Burris and the publisher John Robinson Block. “Cartoonists are not illustrators for a publisher’s politics,” Rogers quips in reply to Blocks and Burris’s critique of his performance at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
“If I drew Trump more often than Block would have liked, it was because I base my cartoons on the most urgent topics at hand. Sadly, Trump provides that fodder every day.”
Some recent cartoons by Rob Roberts the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette would not publish:
Originated and authored by Rob Roberts
Publisher John Robinson Block is a Trump supporter who said during a 2013 community forum on racism that people of color need to pull themselves up “by their bootstraps” like they did in the “old days.” Both Block and Burris met with Trump on his private plane at Toledo Express Airport in September 2016 after a campaign rally.
It is pretty obvious which way the wind blows today at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Some great cartoons which just made their way to my Facebook page.
“Freedom of the Press,” has always meant freedom for those that OWN the presses. The publisher has exercised that right. The mass media has always been dominated by those able to afford the huge infrastructure: printing presses, broadcast licenses, etc. This is part of why the internet has held the possibility of greatly democratizing information. And, for good and bad, it has. On the one hand, we have bloggers like Doris “Tanta” Dungey who was hugely influental and informative during the RE bubble, holding the crazy banking practices up to the light while blogging in her fuzzy slippers. On the other hand, we have racists organizing rallies and reaching a wide audience and normalizing their vile beliefs.
And THAT is why the loss of “net neutrality” is so important. It is a return to the pre-internet days when only multi-millionaires could have a mass audience. Make no mistake it is not just about big telecom being able to find another channel to extract rents. It is also about them choosing what ideas are “suitable” for our tender ears.
They simply do not care what they do or say, they know their base will never punish them for anything. What the Dems need to do most is to stop trying to attract rep voters. Not going to happen.
Dems need to attack the rep candidates, not to attract rep voters, but to increase dem turnout. Flat out call them racists at every opportunity. Flat out call them thieves who have supported the fraud of the trump administration. Attack at every moment.
Because what they do is worse. Dems keep bringing knives to a gun fight.
“S.E. Cupp, a conservative publishing in the New York Times opinion pages and as such held to no editorial standards whatsoever, provides an example of the kind of salt-of-the-Earth white-working-class voter the Democrats just can’t persuade, recycled from Trump Whisperer and grifter Salena Zito:
Salena Zito, co-author of the new book “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics,” recently surveyed 2,000 Trump voters in the rust belt. They are the kind of voters, she says, that experts overlooked in 2016 and still don’t get today.
One of them is Amy Maurer, a 43-year-old well-educated suburban mom in Kenosha, Wis. The Clinton campaign aimed ads at women like Ms. Maurer, keying in on Mr. Trump’s misogynistic remarks.
“It’s not my favorite thing,” she said when I asked her about the way Mr. Trump has talked about women. “It’s kind of like what I told my mother-in-law when she complained that her heart surgeon wasn’t very friendly: If he’s good at what he does, who cares? He’s not there to be your best friend.”
Here’s an earlier piece by Zito introducing the world to Maurer—”the married, educated, suburban mom whom experts missed in the 2016 election….The Clinton campaign tried hard to win over voters like Maurer with ads highlighting Trump’s most misogynistic remarks”
And here’s this representative Midwestern woman voter who the Democrats just couldn’t craft the right message to win over, posing with her fellow members of the executive board of the Republican Party of Kenosha County”
And every Democrat running should use the pictures(especially the 2 year old honduran girl) in these photos.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/separating-families-at-border-was-always-part-of-the-plan.html
This is what republicans that support trump do, this racist inspired policy of stealing children from their parents. This is not what americans do, this is what republicans do.
“Keith Burris defining a liberal is like Donald Trump defining femininity.”
I can clear up one of the points raised. The founders of neoliberalism were two Austrian economists, Mises and Hayek joined later by Milton Friedman. Neoliberalism was a reaction to Keynesian economics that said we should go back to the economics of the classical economists, Smith, Ricardo, Mathus, Say, etc. and most specifically to the policies of the classical liberals of 1830’s England.
When Keith Burns wrote about what defined a classical liberal this is what he was referring to, not the American understanding of being a liberal. Burns is almost certainly a Libertarian because it was common for them to call themselves a classical liberal for a while, say five or ten years ago.
Thank you Don