Pittsburgh Newspaper Editorial Irks Union

Journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, along with former employees and some city luminaries, are expressing outrage over a pro-Trump editorial ordered up by the paper’s publisher that they view as endorsing racism.

Politico report the editorial, titled “Reason as racism,” argued that calling someone a racist is “the new McCarthyism” and defended the sentiment behind President Donald Trump’s reported suggestion that the United States take immigrants from an overwhelmingly white country such as Norway rather than “shithole countries” like Haiti or in Africa.

“It is not racist to say that this country cannot take only the worst people from the worst places and that we want some of the best people from the best places, many of which are inhabited by people of color,” the editorial read. “That’s not racism, it is reason.”

The Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, which represents 150 employees at the paper, said in a letter to the editor that it was “collectively appalled and crestfallen by the repugnant editorial.”

“As a matter of course, the Guild does not weigh in on editorial positions, but this piece is so extraordinary in its mindless, sycophantic embrace of racist values and outright bigotry espoused by this country’s president that we would be morally, journalistically, and humanly remiss not to speak out against it,” wrote the Guild’s executive committee.

The Post-Gazette didn’t run the letter to the editor, which later circulated online, or another letter denouncing the editorial and signed by 28 former employees of the paper. “This is not the Post-Gazette we knew,” the former employees wrote.

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