Rob Rogers had been with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for 25 years.
By Lydia O’Connor
HuffPost (6/14/18)
A veteran editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was fired Thursday after he and the newspaper’s management clashed over some sketches critical of President Donald Trump.
Rob Rogers, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who had been with the Post-Gazette for 25 years, announced his own ouster on Twitter. Earlier this month, he’d revealed that he was working through “unresolved” issues with the paper’s leaders over certain cartoons that they’d declined to publish.
A broader push for less negative Trump coverage in the paper has been linked to John Block, its conservative publisher, and to Burris, the editorial director.
“I knew in March” ― when he said the paper first started rejecting his cartoon drafts and ideas without explanation ― “that we were headed for some kind of a compromise or a showdown,” Rogers told HuffPost. “I didn’t know what it was going to be, but it turns out it was a showdown.”
The Thursday meeting in which he was fired, Rogers said, was the last of several he’d had with the human resources department since the paper’s editorial director, Keith Burris, began cracking down on his cartoons.
Since March, the Post-Gazette had axed 19 of his cartoon drafts and proposals without explanation, Rogers said. Over the course of a typical year, he noted, only a couple of his submissions would be rejected.
Rogers’ concerns mounted when he said the paper rejected six of his ideas in a row starting on Memorial Day, including one that depicted Trump laying an R.I.P. wreath before a tomb reading “Truth, Honor, Rule of Law” and another showing the president separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents. …
Read the Rest, Collection of Censored Cartoons and 2-Minute Video
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An American Editorial Cartoonist Has Been Fired For Skewering Trump. He Likely Won’t Be The Last
Trump has many “fixers.”
By Ann Telnes
Th e Washington Post (6/15/18)
“Oh, good lord.”
That was my reaction the day after the election of Donald Trump in November of 2016, when it dawned on me that I would be serving my year as president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists during the same time as the guy who wanted to “open up” libel laws and weaken the First Amendment so he could sue journalists more easily. Instead of the usual loss of jobs for editorial cartoonists that a president of the AAEC has to address during his or her tenure, now I’d be dealing with a much more fundamental threat to our profession: a president of the United States who has no idea or respect for the institution of a free press and its role in a democracy.
I did worry that editorial cartooning would be the next target of a president so enamored of visuals. That didn’t happen. In retrospect, I’m fairly certain it’s because Trump doesn’t read; he gets all his news from the television (Fox News) and uses Twitter as his megaphone. And I’m guessing his staff doesn’t cut out cartoons and tape them to the White House refrigerator so he will see them as he goes for his regular two scoops of ice cream. But with the firing of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoonist Rob Rogers, we now see that suppressing a free press can be accomplished without an authoritarian president’s orders. Michael Cohen isn’t the only “fixer” Trump has at his disposal. …
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The Story About A New York Times Reporter Caught In A Leak Investigation Keeps Getting Crazier … And Scarier
By David Uberti
Splinter News (6/13/18)
The news last week that the Justice Department had secretly seized phone and email records from a journalist illustrated the extreme lengths to which the Trump administration will go to crack down on leaks. The news that the seizure was intertwined with a relationship the reporter had been having with someone on her beat illustrated the ethical perils of such a choice.
But another, equally troubling development in the story came on Tuesday night courtesy of the Washington Post. The newspaper reported that a Customs and Border Protection agent independently confronted the same reporter—Ali Watkins, a New York Times journalist who previously worked at Politico and BuzzFeed—about her confidential sources a year ago, several months before the FBI had approached her about the leak investigation that would eventually include the seizure of her records and culminate in the arrest of a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer. …
- Trump Calls Female Reporter ‘So Obnoxious,’ Tells Her To Be Quiet — Are you looking for more substance to President Donald Trump’s vague claim that North Korea “is no longer a nuclear threat”? So was CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang as she jostled with other reporters outside the White House Friday morning trying to get in a question with the president. … Read the Rest and 1+-Minute Video
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7 Whack-A-Doodle Crazy Moments In Trump’s White House Lawn Friday Press Conference — President Donald Trump on Friday went on the White House lawn and gave an absolutely bonkers impromptu press conference in which he spouted numerous falsehoods, absurdities and lies. While it’s difficult to narrow down the craziest moments from the Trump press conference, here are seven particularly nutty moments. … Read the Rest and 30-Minute Video