The editorial argued that calling someone a racist is “the new McCarthyism” and defended the sentiment behind President Donald Trump’s reported comment. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Editorial backing Trump in ‘shithole’ controversy sparks outrage Pittsburgh Post-Gazette owner ordered the paper to run an editorial defending president on racism charge.

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.

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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John Allison, editorial page editor of the Post-Gazette, told POLITICO that the decision not to run the current and former employees’ letters was made by John R. Block, who serves as chairman, publisher and editor-in-chief. Block also made the decision to run the controversial editorial Monday in the Post-Gazette after it was published two days earlier in the Toledo Blade, another paper owned by the family-run Block Communications. Allison said it is not uncommon for the two Block-owned papers to share editorials.

Block did not respond to a request for comment. Post-Gazette executive editor David Shribman, who leads the newsroom, also did not respond.

The 62-year-old Block is the latest in a long line of family members to lead the Post-Gazette. He is the son of the late Paul Block Jr, who, along with brother William Block Sr., served as co-publisher of the Toledo Blade and Post-Gazette. He’s a conservative, as is his brother Allan, the chairman of Block Communications, though the Post-Gazette twice endorsed Barack Obama for president. (Allan Block personally endorsed Mitt Republican Romney in the latter race.)

In March 2016, however, local news site Billy Penn reported that there were concerns inside the Post-Gazette newsroom that the Pittsburgh paper and its Toledo sibling were considering endorsing Trump in the state’s Republican primary, which did not end up happening.

Later in the year, however, speculation ramped up again about the Post-Gazette possibly backing Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the general election. In September, Block and Keith Burris, the editorial page editor of the Toledo Blade, met with Trump aboard his plane following a Toledo rally. Block even posted a photo with Trump on Facebook, writing, “In 39 years of full time journalism, I’ve met many interesting people. This one was more than memorable.”

Nonetheless, the Post-Gazette didn’t endorse Trump in the general election – but didn’t choose Clinton, either. “Many of us are unhappy with the choices the two major parties have offered for the presidency this far,” read the Nov. 6, 2016 editorial aimed at the “undecided voter.”

Pittsburgh voters were quite decisive, with Clinton winning 75 percent of the vote, though she lost the state of Pennsylvania to Trump by less than a percentage point.

Questions about Block’s handling of the crude immigration comments attributed to Trump at meetings with lawmakers came up even before the Post-Gazette ran the editorial. Last week, the paper’s official social media account announced that the paper’s publisher had requested they remove the “vulgar language” attributed to Trump from an Associated Press story on the “shithole” fallout.

But it’s the Monday editorial that’s sparked outrage beyond the newsroom and into a Pennsylvania city that voted overwhelmingly for Democrat Hillary Clinton. The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments said in a joint statement that “the editorial is a silly mix of deflection and distortion that provides cover for racist rhetoric while masquerading as a defense of decency.” The piece, they said, “is unworthy of a proud paper and an embarrassment to Pittsburgh.”

On Thursday, the Post-Gazette published a letter in which more than a dozen members of the Block family, which has owned the paper for almost a century, said the editorial didn’t represent their values or that of William Block Sr., who helped steer the paper for six decades. The editorial, they wrote, “published on Martin Luther King Day, printed without the Post-Gazette editorial board’s consensus, and attempting to justify blatant racism, is a violation of that legacy.”

“We do not condone the sentiments expressed in the piece,” the family members added. “We do not condone the whitewashing of racism, nor the normalization of it. We cannot remain silent and by implication approve of the use of the Post-Gazette to provide cover for racism.”