Propping up the once-potent brand name of the big-city daily newspaper isn’t netting the dominant media establishment anything close to a positive return anymore. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which has been around since 1786, has announced that it will publish its final edition on May 3. Staggering financial losses are merely a symptom, not the cause. The root problem lies with an out-of-touch profession that still believes it wields vast influence over public opinion from its towering perch and will not accept the reality of its dismal standing among Americans today.
“Over the past 20 years, Block Communications has lost more than $350 million in cash operating the Post-Gazette,” the paper’s owners wrote in a January 7 news release. “Despite those efforts, the realities facing local journalism make continued cash losses at this scale no longer sustainable.”
On Strike But Still Endorsing Kamala
Block also referenced a fierce legal dispute with striking newspaper workers that further reflects the disconnect modern journalists have as to their current status. As was seen in mortifying fashion during layoffs at The Los Angeles Times in 2024, overwhelmingly left-leaning reporters and editors at big-box dailies consider themselves to be essential workers in the eyes of the general public, right up there with firefighters and paramedics.
When its labor walkout began in October 2022, striking Post-Gazette workers put out their own news site, called The Pittsburgh Union Progress. Why? Because “local journalism” is so important. A typical day’s coverage on the site over the course of three years shows one or two local news stories a day at most.
But the striking journalists made sure that the publication would include its presidential endorsement for 2024. “Jeff Bezos is chickens**t, but we’re not,” the headline declared, mocking The Washington Post owner who did not allow that paper to endorse a candidate.
The cheeky article apparently went for humor but revealed naked bias.
“Presidential politics has, since 2016, devolved into a cartoon. We would laugh if it wasn’t so dangerous,” the editorial read. “When we heard [Republican nominee Donald] Trump say a few days ago that people should point guns at Liz Cheney, we couldn’t take it anymore. It keeps getting worse.”
That, of course, is a wild distortion of what the man said but you can see where this is heading.
“PUP is endorsing Kamala Harris for president,” the piece continued. “It’s the only choice for us. We’re a publication produced by working people on strike – for more than two years, now – and the first Trump term was not good for working folks…. We expect a second term would be worse.”
Harvard Defines the Proper Role of a Newspaper
The employees of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette certainly have every right to their own personal opinions. It is the inability to grasp that those opinions carry zero sway with the American people that has been their downfall.
It should be noted that The Post-Gazette actually endorsed Trump over Joe Biden in 2020 and even published an editorial defending him from accusations of racism when he called Haiti a “sh*thole” in 2018. Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab blames the Block family for these unforgivable lapses.
“Both John and Allan have moved further to the Trumpist right in recent years, leading to some embarrassingly racist content and a rare Trump endorsement from a major newspaper,” Neiman wrote in its obit for The Post-Gazette. Again, it’s so telling. Endorsing a populist Republican candidate or opposing the monolithic “that’s racist” narrative is shocking behavior for responsible daily newspapers in the eyes of Harvard’s journalism laboratory.
How Can Pittsburgh Survive Without Its Daily Pro-Illegal Alien Editorial?
But be not deceived. These were mere blips on an overwhelmingly leftist trajectory at The Post-Gazette.
Here’s an excerpt from a December 11, 2020, newspaper editorial:
“White supremacists now account for the largest share of US domestic terrorism. This is a sobering fact.
“In September, FBI Director Christopher Wray noted in a House Homeland Security committee meeting that there were more domestic terrorism investigations this year than previous years’ averages and that racially motivated extremist violence makes up the largest portion of those investigations.
“And this is not an abstract national problem. More recently, on Nov. 12, an FBI analyst with the Pittsburgh office of the FBI called southwestern Pennsylvania a ‘hub’ for white supremacy and extremists.”
This piece, written as Joe Biden was poised to enter the White House, was meant to help lay the groundwork for his administration’s four-year demonization of American citizens as it grossly downplayed the threat posed by foreign terrorists, too many of whom were able to enter the US under Biden’s “humanitarian parole” refugee policies.
Let’s look at illegal immigration. Here is a sample of headlines culled from the opinion pages of The Post-Gazette in 2025:
- “Undocumented workers are good for the economy”
- “Editorial: The immigrants may go. But the work won’t”
- “Editorial: The government can’t turn everyone into immigration enforcement officers”
- “He contributed to America. He only wanted asylum. ICE took him anyway.”
“We must all acknowledge the important work undocumented immigrants have done for Pennsylvania,” that second bulleted article declared.
“The federal government has the right to enforce federal law. It does not have the right to force local governments, and all citizens, to participate – nor to serve administration policy rather than human needs,” the third bulleted editorial asserts.
This is what Harvard considers to be a daily newspaper with reprehensibly rightist tendencies.
Launching a strike at a publication that has lost hundreds of millions of dollars trying to keep tripe such as this afloat perfectly captures the myopia of the “journalists” responsible for these articles and headlines. Is it tragi-comic or merely comical that America’s dominant media staffers perceive themselves to be irreplaceable stewards of the public good as the very people they claim to speak for tune them out in droves as empty noise?
