An American editorial cartoonist has been fired for skewering Trump. He likely won’t be the last.; The Washington Post, June 15, 2018

Ann Telnaes, The Washington Post; An American editorial cartoonist has been fired for skewering Trump. He likely won’t be the last.

"...[W]ith the firing of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoonist Rob Rogers, we now see that suppressing a free press can be accomplished without an authoritarian president’s orders. Michael Cohen isn’t the only “fixer” Trump has at his disposal.

Rogers has been the editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for more than 25 years. Most working cartoonists have had an occasional idea spiked by his or her editor. But in the past few weeks, editorial director Keith Burris and publisher John Robinson Block have refused to publish six of Rogers’s cartoons, all criticizing Trump or his policies. Block and Burris have also rejected many of Rogers’s rough sketch ideas for several months.

This wasn’t the first time Block has used his position to defend President Trump’s actions; in January he demanded an editorial run in the Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade (where he is also the publisher) supporting Trump’s use of the term “shithole countries.”"

Political prisoner hit with another Kafkaesque charge for writing NYT piece about harsh repression by U.S. ally Bahrain; Salon, 9/6/16

Ben Norton, Salon; Political prisoner hit with another Kafkaesque charge for writing NYT piece about harsh repression by U.S. ally Bahrain:

"A prominent human rights activist who already faced up to 15 years in prison for Twitter posts has now been hit with another charge after writing publicly about his Kafkaesque case.

Detained Bahraini activist Nabeel Rajab published an op-ed in The New York Times on Sunday titled “Letter from a Bahraini Jail” (a play on Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail”)...

The U.S. State Department has publicly called on Bahrain to release Rajab. It also said it has “raised concerns with the government of Bahrain, particularly on this case.” But Rajab argues the U.S. is not doing enough."