Why is the Post-Gazette taking an eraser to an important messenger? | Opinion

By Dennis Roddy

Newspapers are supposed to be places of radical honesty, so at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, anyone who wandered from the foundations of journalism was guaranteed a calling out.

When then-editor John Craig took a mayoral appointment to the city's River Life Task Force most of us thought it a supremely conflicting thing. He stood in the middle of the newsroom and people openly gave him hell for it.

Under the great Bill Block Sr., the PG bought a share of the Pirates in the 1990s. He learned that some of us disapproved when he picked up his own newspaper and read a piece by legendary columnist Brian O'Neill, who explained without stint or fear, why Block should sell his shares.

As long as we got the facts right and worked in good faith, we had nothing to fear but misplaced modifiers and the parking meter attendants. Newspapers might break your heart, but they weren't supposed to break your conscience.

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The PG opinion pages were the showcase for the paper's commitment to the idea that a jolly good argument could be just that. Liberals and conservatives alike went there for the adrenaline rush of being confronted with ideas they didn't like but needed to hear.

That brings us to the growing crisis surrounding Rob Rogers, an editorial cartoonist who has made the Post-Gazette famous, first for his cartoons, and now for their absence.

Rob's politics and mine are not the same.

In fact, when I worked in the Corbett administration, he did his darnedest to make me unemployed.

God knows I've wanted to choke Rob on more than one occasion. He's opinionated, unrestrained, and a wisenheimer of the top chop. In short, he's doing his job. He is the indispensable irritant that keeps us scratching and thinking.

So, when Keith Burris, the newly installed opinion editor, arrived from out-of-town and started killing Rob's cartoons, we began to shudder a little. On average, an editorial cartoonist has maybe four drawings killed in a year. Since March, the new opinion editor has spiked 19 of Rob's cartoons. We've heard all sorts of explanations emanating from the building on the North Shore:

He's too harsh.

He's too fixated on Donald Trump.

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.

Keith Burris either doesn't understand these things or he chooses to ignore them. He has thrown down a gauntlet, dared anyone to pick it up, and now he's surprised to find it shoved up his nose.

Newspapers are more than private property. They are community institutions -- civic trusts protected by Constitution and, as such, part of a social contract. Their obligation is not only to be independent voices, but to elevate the culture by enabling and nurturing independence of thought.

I could see the changes in my final years there.

Internal messages to the staff would refer to "supervisors" when newspapers are supposed to have editors. We heard our editions referred to as "product," which is akin to calling marriage a contract or pork roast a dead pig. A sameness of thought, a worship of rules over conscience, has crept into the institution. It only remained for someone born rich to start lecturing the rest of us on the virtues of thrift and insist that their tastes equated with universal truth.

That's what is so sad about the Post-Gazette's attempt to turn its editorial cartoonist into an extension of a publisher's whims rather than a celebration of open debate and spirited dissent. All it takes is for one mediocre man or woman to place their comfort above the common good for a civic institution to run aground.

That's why editorial page editors should not be sycophants. Still, if Keith Burris chooses to be one, he should not expect others to follow. Even in this age of dissipating spirits, some of us still have souls. Rob Rogers is one of them. And today, he is more necessary than ever.

Dennis Roddy is a former Post-Gazette staff writer and columnist who now works as a media consultant. He also formerly contributed opinion journalism to PennLive.