AAEC AAEC-feed

Updated: Supporting Rob Rogers

Skip to comments

D. D. Degg June 11, 2018 1 minute 2 comments

Updated June 11

The Columbia Journalism Review is reporting on the controversy:

Rogers took some time off from the Post-Gazette, but said he hopes to return to work this week. “I plan to draw the best work I can draw and submit it with the intention of getting it in the paper,” he says.  “I know what I can expect from myself: I will not change my political slant or my opinions or my way of drawing to please somebody else’s viewpoint.” What he can expect from the Post-Gazette remains unclear.

Original June 10 post below

Editorial cartoonist Rob Rogers, whose opinions have been shut out of his regular spot in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has been getting support from far and wide. Perhaps most importantly though, support is coming from local Pittsburgh readers and subscribers. Today, as The Incline reports, those people rallied in front of the old Post-Gazette building championing Rob Rogers’ cause.

Organizer Lynn Cullen, a Pittsburgh journalist who hosts an internet radio talk show on the Pittsburgh City Paper‘s website, said of the impetus for the event, “It’s the proverbial canary in the coal mine, it’s the proverbial slippery slope: A newspaper actually censoring its own political cartoonist whose very job is to provoke and inform.”

That same Lynn Cullen used her hour-long radio show on June 7 to discuss with Rob Rogers the unusual circumstances of an employer refusing to allow an employee to do his job, but keeping him on the payroll. Listen to the broadcast here.

The above photo and the radio link came via the June 7 Pittsburgh City Paper article about Rob.

Former Post-Gazette writer Dennis Roddy expresses his opinion for Penn Live with what the Post-Gazette’s management is trying to pass off as newspaper protocol:

Then came the explanation that tipped us all off to how broken the place has become: that an editorial cartoonist is supposed to mirror the political positions of the newspaper and its publisher.

It’s not true. In fact, it flies in the face of what a political cartoonist is supposed to do.

The clearest example was in 1984 when the Kansas City Times endorsed Ronald Reagan for a second term. Editorial cartoonist Lee Judge inked a picture of himself pointing to the editorial in that Sunday’s editions, holding his nose.

Editorial cartoonists are the in-house dissenters, the newspaper equivalent of a small boy, snowball in hand, who spots a top hat passing on the other side of the fence and just can’t resist.

Also yesterday cartoonist and journalist Rob Tornoe updated the Rob Rogers controversy for Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News readers on the other side of the state.

“…since Burris took over in March, Rogers has seen 19 cartoons or ideas spiked, most involving criticism of President Trump.”

Tornoe and Philly.com shared all of Rogers rejected cartoons and some of Rogers’ preliminary sketches.

And it is not just a local story.

Papers across the United States are running with it. More than a few newspapers have picked up Michael Cavna‘s Washington Post June 8 article – from Danbury, Connecticut to San Francisco, California