12/5/2023 0 Comments Cnn typo niger![]() So, if you’re feeling outraged about Rob Rogers, you’re not alone – the Post-Gazette’s union reporters and non-unionized editors took out ads in their own paper distancing themselves from their publisher as a result. The power to select content is also the power to stifle content. You just quietly discard it in favor of a less controversial cartoon. It’s easier to kill a cartoon from a syndicate. They have a voice that they can raise with you in person. It’s harder to kill a cartoon from your staff cartoonist – like a writer would, they complain. But those firings could easily have been masked as layoffs, especially since syndicated cartoons are far less expensive. Editors get tired of the complaints from readers. A syndicated cartoon is distributed to hundreds of papers by a news service. A staff cartoonist is someone who works as a salaried employee, much like a reporter. Newspapers get tired of the controversy that a full-time cartoonist can cause. My state, Texas – the second-largest in the Union – doesn’t have a single full-time cartoonist. The generally accepted number by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists is that there were about 180 staff cartoonists three decades ago. He was right to go public.īut what’s missing from the situation is the outrage for the quiet firing of over 100 cartoonists around the country over the past few decades. His situation was clearly growing intolerable. ![]() That’s the whole point of being a cartoonist. But, there is absolutely no reason to be an editorial cartoonist if you don’t have the opportunity to express yourself. Getting a string of cartoons killed is generally not a good harbinger of things to come, and going public with it is a risky gambit. ![]() ![]() I called him a few days later to express concern about his job security. Given the context of Roseanne Barr’s tweet about Valerie Jarrett - an African-American woman who was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama – the cartoon showing a KKK member blaming his racism on “Ambien” was completely within the bounds of fair commentary. I was actually the first one to comment – “That was killed?” I could see absolutely no rationale for killing that cartoon. Newspaper fires cartoonist critical of Trump Rob went public on Facebook that week after the fourth one – an image of someone in a Klan outfit asking a doctor, in a reference to Roseanne Barr’s attempt to explain her racist tweets, “Could it be the Ambien?” – was killed. There were 19 cartoons killed in that span – six in a single week. “When I had lunch with my new boss a few months ago, he informed me that the paper’s publisher believed that the editorial cartoonist was akin to an editorial writer, and that his views should reflect the philosophy of the newspaper,” according to him. Rob’s firing occurred after what he described to The New York Times as months of pressure from his editor. ![]() Certainly these events are not equivalent, but for a cartoonist like me, they stand out as the events involving my profession that cause America to pause and take notice.Īs with so many other outrages, America then usually goes back to sleep and pays little attention to the existential threat to editorial cartooning unfolding under their noses.Ī number of Americans are justifiably outraged by Rob’s firing (disclosure: we’re friends). Nick Anderson Nick Anderson and Angel DrakeĪnd now, in a different register, there is the Orwellian firing of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoonist, Rob Rogers, after a 25-year career, for doing cartoons critical of President Trump. ![]()
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