Pittsburgh Newspaper's Editorial On Trump, Racism Prompts Uproar

PITTSBURGH, PA - A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial that defends a recent vulgarity allegedly made by President Trump and compares calling someone a racist to McCarthyism has been denounced by two prominent Pittsburgh foundations.

The Heinz Endowments and the Pittsburgh Foundation stated in a joint letter letter to the newspaper that the editorial “Reason as racism: An Immigration Debate Gets Derailed” is “a silly mix of deflection and distortion that provides cover for racist rhetoric.” The two foundations labeled its publication an “embarrassment to Pittsburgh.”

Twenty-eight former Post-Gazette staffers also voiced their anger in a letter on the editorial, published Monday on Martin Luther King Day. Additionally, some newspaper staffers are withholding their bylines on stories to protest the piece.

Trump has been extensively criticized for allegedly describing African nations and Haiti as "s---hole countries" in a meeting last week in which he rejected a bipartisan deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The Post-Gazette temporarily removed the vulgarity in the lede of the Associated Press story it ran on the meeting.

But the newspaper shrugged off the alleged vulgarity in the editorial.

“If Donald Trump is called a racist for saying some nations are “s---hole countries, does that help pass a `Dreamers’ bill to keep gifted young people in this nation?” the Post-Gazette asked. “If the president had used the word `hellhole’ instead, would that have been racist?”

The editorial further suggested that the word `racist’ be confined to people like Bull Connor, the Birmingham, Alabama public safety commissioner and staunch opponent of the civil rights movement, and the white supremacist mass murderer Dylann Roof.

The two foundations called the editorial “a sorry pastiche of whitewashing drivel.

“It builds a straw-man argument that the term `racist’ is too often used to silence opponents, completely ignoring this President’s well-established pattern of repeatedly invoking race to divide the country and to attack his enemies,” the letter stated. “If you don’t want to be called a racist, don’t be racist.”

The letter was signed by Heinz Endowments president Grant Oliphant and Pittsburgh Foundation CEO Maxwell King, the former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

John Allison, who edits the Post-Gazette editorial page, told The Incline that the piece was published in both the P-G and its sister paper, the Toledo Blade, at the behest of publisher John Robinson Block. The publisher also was the person who ordered the vulgarity excised from the lede in last week’s story, a Post-Gazette tweet indicated.

The controversy is erupting as Trump prepares to make his first appearance in the Pittsburgh area as president on Thursday. He’ll visit H&K Equipment in North Fayette to tout the recently approved tax reform legislation and also is expected to stump for Rick Saccone, the Republican candidate in the upcoming special election in the 18th Congressional District.

Photo: Associated Press.