Political Cartoonist Fired For Trump Criticism Tells His Story In Comic Form
Rob Rogers, the longtime Pittsburgh Post-Gazette political cartoonist fired last month after the publisher and editorial page director rejected his works criticizing President Donald Trump, tells his own story in his latest sketches.
Rogers begins his new cartoon strip, published Tuesday on the comics site The Nib, with Trump uttering his signature “The Apprentice” catchphrase: “You’re fired!”
“OK... He didn’t actually say that to me... But he might as well have,” Rogers wrote of his firing, which came amid a spate of editorial controversies involving the paper’s pro-Trump publisher, John Robinson Block, and newly installed editorial page director Keith Burris.
In the series of cartoons titled “I Was Fired For Criticizing Trump,” Rogers recounts his long history at the paper with little pushback from his bosses — until the 2016 presidential election, when Block spent time with then-candidate Trump on his campaign plane.
Rogers said earlier that Block’s oversight of his work intensified this year, when Burris took over as Post-Gazette editorial page director. According to Rogers, the paper’s bosses rejected 19 of his cartoons ― about 90 percent of them related to Trump.
“I began to envision the two of them as Master Blaster from ‘Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome,‘” Rogers wrote in his new comic strip. “My bosses said my cartoons were ‘not funny.’ Maybe they weren’t laughing because they were seeing their own beliefs laid bare on the editorial page.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/political-cartoonist-fired-for-trump-criticism-tells-his-story-in-comic-form/ar-AAzwv0K?li=BBnbcA1
https://thenib.com/i-was-fired-for-criticizing-trump
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Pittsburgh is in the midst of a battle with their "only" paper - it used to be comfortably middle-to-left in coverage - countering the former Scaife-funded, right-slanted Tribune-Review.
The "Trib" gave it up after their money dried up with the death of Richard Mellon Scaife.
But, the P-G has been tilting the wrong way under the leadership of the Block regime.
Another sad story of a crisis in journalism and the fourth estate, with IQ45 leading the battle against them! 
