The Post-Gazette’s decision to prohibit @alexisjreports, @msantiagophotos (and now other journalists) from reporting on the George Floyd protests is stupid and possibly evil. It’s also very much in keeping with the values of the creeps who run the paper. THREAD
#IStandWithAlexis

I was working at the paper when Keith Burris took over as executive editor last year. My job was to design the newspaper’s front page. This was a great vantage point for watching Burris run the newsroom. From it, I observed a catastrophic breakdown in journalistic ethics.

Here, I’ll emphasize that the rank-and-file journalists at the paper do amazing work despite intolerable conditions. The problems I witnessed were entirely the fault of the paper’s top editors.

News coverage should be objective and free of bias. Under Burris, the paper became less objective and more biased. Sometimes the bias was nakedly political, but often it came in the form of Burris and publisher/part-owner John Block’s constipated opinions on race and racism.

They don’t take racism seriously—especially when people of color speak out against it.

When Congress held a historic session to debate reparations for slavery, and when Trump lobbed racist insults at Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore, newspapers across the country ran these stories prominently. Not the Post-Gazette.

On both occasions, Burris intervened to have the stories stripped off the front page, where editors had planned to run them.

When the paper ran a story about the U.S. House voting to condemn Trump for his “racist comments,” editors were ordered to rewrite the headline to remove the word "racist." They had to avoid mentioning the *thing* the story was *about*

Last summer, Burris tried to kill a powerful piece of investigative journalism about the Pittsburgh-based Colcom foundation.

It markets itself as an environmental organization, but Post-Gazette reporters revealed it mostly bankrolls the U.S. anti-immigration movement, including entities that have been labeled hate groups.

Burris eventually backed down, but he ordered cuts, removing comments from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Days after the story ran, he convened a meeting of editors and told them the Colcom piece was a "bad story," the kind he didn't want written in the future.

As for Block, the mere images of black people are enough to set him off.

When a front page story about computer coding bootcamps was illustrated with a photo of a black programmer, Block became furious. The photo ran in an early edition of the paper, but for the later editions, he ordered it removed.

The top editors also intervened to remove a front-page photo of a demonstration against a white Pittsburgh firefighter who was charged with assaulting a black boy. They insisted the photo wasn’t important enough for the front.

When a Pittsburgh man was arrested for attempting to bomb a North Side church, we ran a photo of the mostly black congregation participating in a worship service. Block hated it. He told editors they shouldn’t have run it, that it was somehow irrelevant to the story.

Considering what I witnessed, I think it’s an impressive feat of gaslighting for Burris and Block to accuse their journalists of bias, when these top editors are themselves deeply biased—and they inject their biases directly into the Post-Gazette’s news coverage.

If you want to understand what Burris stands for, just read his profoundly racist Reason as Racism opinion column, in which he defends Trump’s “shithole countries” remark and dismisses talk of racism as “the new McCarthyism.”

His musings on race are reliably awful. He’s defended the woman who called the police on a black man who asked her to leash her dog in Central Park. Defended a white supremacist who was rejected by Harvard. Claimed the United States is the least racist country in the world.

Burris wrote recently about the national need for empathy. He could begin by showing some to his employees.

One of his recurring themes is the difficulty of obtaining redemption (once you’ve been outed by, as he puts it, “the #MeToo society, the gotcha society”). But if he and I are reading the same Bible, redemption comes only after atonement.

I've detected no remorse from the Post-Gazette’s management team. It’s past time for them to reinstate Alexis Johnson, Michael Santiago and the other journalists they’ve sidelined

While they’re at it, they could offer cartoonist Rob Rogers his old job back, too (one of Burris’ first acts was to fire him for making fun of Trump and throwing jabs at the president’s overt racism).

The Post-Gazette isn’t what it used to be. Burris and Block crippled a once-fine newspaper—by using it to promote their hard-right views on race, by violating the norms of ethical journalism and by their petty and malicious treatment of good journalists.

I don’t have faith that these two have the courage or self awareness to fix what they’ve broken. But any path toward redemption begins with an admission of guilt.