‘He’s just become too angry’: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette publisher defends firing cartoonist
LAKEVILLE, Conn. — The publisher of a Pittsburgh newspaper on Saturday defended the controversial firing of its editorial cartoonist, saying he “hasn’t been funny in a long time.”
“He’s just become too angry for his health or for his own good,” John Block, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, told POLITICO in his first interview since the firing earlier this week. “He’s obsessed with Trump.”
The veteran cartoonist, Rob Rogers, disputed Block’s assessment as “completely inaccurate” and claimed that Block was mistaking strong opinion for anger.
Rogers maintained Saturday that he was let go for being too anti-Trump in his cartoons.
The firing came as journalists and comedians debate how to respond to a president who frequently lambastes the media as “fake news,” and two months after comedian Michelle Wolf was heavily criticized for biting humor aimed at Trump and Sarah Sanders during the White House Correspondents Dinner.
Late-night comedians like Stephen Colbert have also drawn attention during Trump’s presidency for their frequent, sharply worded criticism of Trump.
The Post-Gazette covers a key area in a critical swing state that helped elect Trump president in 2016. The paper helps to shape the views of Trump supporters and others among his base of voters in their state, which will likely play an important role in 2020 as well.
Block said that Rogers wanted to make cartoons every day about Trump, and among the issues that led to his firing was a lack of a diversity of subjects.
“I wanted clever and funny instead of angry and mean,” he said in an interview in Lakeville, Connecticut, at a reunion of his boarding school Hotchkiss.
Editorial cartoonists should augment the positions of the newspaper they work for, not stray too far from them, Block said.
Block said that the newspaper has picked up some conservative readers recently after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which was owned by the late right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, stopped printing daily in 2016.
“We’re trying to have some acceptability to them too,” he said.
Rogers told POLITICO that he didn’t want to draw Trump every day.
"If you look through my work, you will see that many cartoons had nothing to do with Trump," he said in an email.
"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."
"Mr. Block mistakes a strong opinion, particularly one he doesn't agree with, as anger. I see it as my job to critique injustices. I don't see that as anger, nor do many readers or fellow journalists."
Rogers, who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1999 and had worked for the newspaper for over two decades,
wrote a New York Times op-ed on Saturday with the headline “I Was Fired for Making Fun of Trump.”
“Our job is to provoke readers in a way words alone can’t. Cartoonists are not illustrators for a publisher’s politics,” he wrote in the article.
“Every year, a few of my cartoons get killed. But suddenly, in a three-month period, 19 cartoons or proposals were rejected. Six were spiked in a single week — one after it was already placed on the page,” he wrote. He also said he would continue to work on his cartoons “every day of this presidency.” His cartoons will continue to be distributed by a syndication service.
Asked his reaction to the Times op-ed, Block said: “I haven’t seen it yet. He’s playing it for everything that it’s worth and I think that’s a mistake. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Block, who said he has lost $161 million on the newspaper in the last 10 years, declined to say if he had personally given the order to fire Rogers.
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