Cartoonist says he’s been fired after seeing anti-Trump cartoons killed

Veteran editorial cartoonist Rob Rogers said Thursday that he has been terminated from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after a string of his cartoons critical of President Trump were killed. 

“Sad to report this update: Today, after 25 years as the editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I was fired,” Rogers wrote on Twitter. 

Sad to report this update: Today, after 25 years as the editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I was fired.

— Rob Rogers (@Rob_Rogers) June 14, 2018

Rogers told Philly.com his termination came after the newspaper’s editorial director, Keith Burris, killed six of his cartoons while he was on vacation in May.

According to Philly.com, the longtime cartoonist has seen 19 of his cartoons and ideas axed since Burris assumed the position in March. Burris’s controversial editorial defending Trump’s “shithole countries” remark brought considerable backlash to the paper in January.

{mosads}

The paper’s publisher, John Robinson Block, whom Philly.com described as a Trump supporter, hired Burris.

The cartoonist told the outlet that he had been working under Block for almost 25 years before any problems occurred in the past several months. 

Burris said in a statement to a local CBS affiliate last week that the situation with Rogers was “a personnel matter which we are working hard to fix” and added that the paper has “great respect for Rob and understand his importance to the community”

Block told The Washington Post in a statement prior to Roger’s firing that the tensions between the cartoonist and his superiors “has little to do with politics, ideology or Donald Trump. It has mostly to do with working together and the editing process.”