The Post-Gazette goes red

Rob Rogers fired for doing cartoons critical of the Duce

Until he was fired last Thursday—because he insisted on doing his job, which included lampooning the president of the United States—Rob Rogers was the celebrated editorial cartoonist of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“They clearly had a plan to either break me or get rid of me,” Rogers told The Daily Beast about the abrupt end of his 25-year career, at age 59, as the house caricaturist for western Pennsylvania’s dominant media outlet—equal parts satire and indignation, punctuated by a bare-knuckled visual punch.

Rogers’s bosses had killed 19 of his cartoons in recent weeks and all but banned his work from the newspaper. 

A typical Rogers cartoon depicts a morbidly obese Trump, his too-long tie dragging on the ground, as he brandishes a key and bends over a terrified caged immigrant child. 

“This is tragic!” Trump exclaims. “It should be Hillary in there!”

For many year the Pittsburgh Post Gazette was a Democratic newspaper.

But recent changes have resulted in a marked shift to the right.

Starting in March 2018, the traditionally liberal paper started shifting more conservative following the consolidation of its editorial department with that of longtime sister newspaper The Blade and the appointment of that paper's chief editor Keith Burris, a strong supporter of Donald Trump.

In June 2018, cartoonist Rob Rogers was fired after working 25 years for the newspaper.

Rogers had drawn cartoons critical of Donald Trump. Rogers told The Guardian, "Suppressing voices in any situation is bad. You want to have as many voices as you can and they are starting to have only one voice of the paper, and I think that goes against what a free press is all about – especially when silencing that voice is because of the president." 

Bill Peduto, mayor of Pittsburgh said, "The move today by the leadership of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to fire Rob Rogers after he drew a series of cartoons critical of President Trump is disappointing, and sends the wrong message about press freedoms in a time when they are under siege.

"This is precisely the time when the constitutionally protected free press – including critics like Rob Rogers – should be celebrated and supported, and not fired for doing their jobs. 

"This decision, just one day after the president of the United States said the news media is 'our country's biggest enemy', sets a low standard in the 232-year history of the newspaper."

So now Pittsburgh, a Democratic city, has a Trumpist paper and a loony right digital only paper, The Pittsburgh Tribune.