UNITED STATES: In reaction to creator Scott Adams’ racial remarks, which included calling Black Americans a “hate group” and advising white people to “get the hell away” from Black people in a YouTube video, the comic strip Dilbert has been removed from several US newspapers.
Adams’ comments on February 22 were in response to a survey conducted by a conservative group that seemed to indicate 26% of black respondents disagreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” However, 21% of respondents said they were uncertain.
As a result of Adams’ remarks, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post all announced that they would no longer be publishing Dilbert.
Gannett, the biggest newspaper company in the United States, said in a statement that the cartoon will no longer be published by the USA Today Network. The USA Today Network is made up of over 300 local media outlets in 43 states.
In a statement, Gannett said that it had decided to stop printing Scott Adams’ comic book due to recent discriminatory remarks made by him. “We support and respect free speech, but his ideas don’t fit with our editorial or business values,” the statement said.
Chris Quinn, an executive at Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer newspaper, said the choice to discontinue the comic strip was not “difficult.”
“Just flee, wherever you have to go, because this cannot be fixed. It’s not repairable. Therefore, I no longer believe that it is appropriate for a white American person to attempt to assist black people. It is not logical. There is no longer an urge that makes sense.”
After his remarks went viral on social media, publishers who were carrying the comic strip were under pressure to stop publishing Adams’s work.
A media source said on Saturday that it had stopped publishing the Dilbert comic strip “in light of Scott Adams’s recent statements promoting segregation,” adding that readers had written in to ask for the cartoon to be taken down.
The cartoonist has in the past asserted that his race has caused some of his ideas to be shelved.
In 2022, he created Dave the Black Engineer, the first black character in the history of Dilbert, and used him to make fun of transsexual identity and workplace diversity.
He described the cancellation of a Dilbert animated TV show 20 years prior as “the third job I lost for being white” in June 2020.
Adams tweeted that she would “self-identify as a black woman” until Joseph Biden chose his presidential nominee for the US Supreme Court 13 months earlier, in January 2022.
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