"...[W]ith the firing of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoonist Rob Rogers, we now see that suppressing a free press can be accomplished without an authoritarian president’s orders. Michael Cohen isn’t the only “fixer” Trump has at his disposal.
Rogers has been the editorial cartoonist for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for more than 25 years. Most working cartoonists
have had an occasional idea spiked by his or her editor. But in the
past few weeks, editorial director Keith Burris and publisher John
Robinson Block have refused to publish six
of Rogers’s cartoons, all criticizing Trump or his policies. Block and
Burris have also rejected many of Rogers’s rough sketch ideas for
several months.
This wasn’t the first time Block has used his position to defend President Trump’s actions; in January he demanded an editorial run in the Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade (where he is also the publisher) supporting Trump’s use of the term “shithole countries.”"
