Scott Adams is apparently trying to get “Dilbert” canceled by as many newspapers as possible. The Boston Globe should accommodate him immediately.
Adams has long been known as a Donald Trump supporter. Last week, though, he went well beyond praising the racist ex-president with a vile racist rant of his own, referring to Black people as a “hate group” and saying, “I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people.” There was more. Martha Ross has the gory details at The Mercury News of San Jose.
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Among the newspapers dropping “Dilbert” is The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. “This is not a difficult decision,” wrote editor Chris Quinn. The Plain Dealer is part of the Advance Local chain and, according to Quinn, several other Advance papers have come to the same conclusion — including “newspapers in Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Alabama, Massachusetts and Oregon.” The Massachusetts newspaper is The Republican of Springfield, which also publishes the MassLive website. I haven’t seen an announcement at MassLive yet.
Nor have I seen an announcement from the Globe, an independent paper owned by John and Linda Henry. As Quinn noted, it can take a while for a canceled feature to disappear from the print edition. But it can be canceled immediately on the digital side — yet “Dilbert” is in its usual spot today on the Globe’s website.
This shouldn’t be a hard call. As Quinn notes, the Lee chain dropped “Dilbert” from its 77 papers last year after Adams introduced a Black character whose role was to mock “woke” culture and the LGBTQ community. “Dilbert” has been living on borrowed time, and it has long since ceased to be funny.
Adams is obviously trying to get canceled so he can go on some sort of right-wing grievance tour. This is not a matter of respecting all views — Adams did everything but don a sheet and terrorize his Black neighbors. (Oh, wait. He doesn’t have any. He also said he’s moved to a nearly all-white community in order to get away from Black people.) It’s time for mainstream news outlets to part company with this vicious hatemonger.
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It’s been more than 20 years since I was a regular reader of the Globe’s comics section, but for decades before that, it always struck me as a comics section edited by people who had no interest in comics. Perhaps they haven’t been paying attention to Adams.